The Stolen Child
by HHvonKatte
Summary: Tim Latimer returns to Farringham after the Great War and begins to make a life for himself, albeit an unconventional one, all the while waiting for the day when he will see the Doctor once more.  Highly pretentious, minor slashy overtones, please review.
1. A World More Full Of Weeping

Note: This is my first ever fanfic and it's, um, pretty pretentious to say the least. The title is from Yeats, but there are references to _Slaughterhouse Five_ by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, Collette's _Last of Cheri_, and a bit of the old DH Lawrence for good measure. I have a feeling it started with a minor crush on Harry Lloyd as Baines, and kind of snowballed from there.

* * *

Away with us he's going

The solemn-eyed.

- W.B. Yeats, _The Stolen Child_

Being young you have not known

The fool's triumph, nor yet

Love lost as soon as won,

Nor the best labourer dead

And all the sheaves to bind.

What need have you to dread

The monstrous crying of wind?

- W.B. Yeats, _To A Child Dancing Upon The Wind_

* * *

He was on that hill for a long time, and he expected to be there for eternity. The world might change around him, flowers fall, men die, but he would stay. Deep inside him he felt the tiny part that was left of the boy he had taken; an odious boy once, an unthinking, uncaring boy, now only the smallest, dwindling flame of a boy. He did not feel angry. He had, now, what he had wanted all along. There was no need to feel angry.

If anyone ought to feel angry, it was that tiny, dwindling flame, that even now wanted dearly to set all the straw ablaze.

* * *

"What do you do when God has gone away?" Eleanor had asked once. They had been out walking, and it was summer, and above them the sky was a hazy violet-blue quite unlike the sharp and painful colour that it was in autumn. They lay together on a blanket in the long grass, and watched the barges move like slow painted swans on the canal. She rested her head in the hollow of his neck.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Oh, you know. The Enlightenment, which they say now was the triumph of reason over all else – it seems bizarre, doesn't it? Voltaire's palpable rage, his anguished despair, at the earthquake in Lisbon and all the horrors of life, is not like the triumph of something so cool and symmetrical. Not at all, to me at any rate. It wasn't a triumph. Voltaire simply realised that he had been abandoned by God. God had gone away. What could he do? Isn't that like you," this last haltingly, "when you think of the war?"

"Yes, of course," he replied. A complete lie, on his part. In the sky, a solitary kite was swooping and crying joyously. He did not feel that God had abandoned him when he thought of the war, but he knew the feeling all the same. He knew that one day he would see the Doctor again, but until then – he was alone.

"Then what will you do, my darling?"

"What Voltaire did, I suppose," he'd said. "I shall go to work in the garden."

He realised then that it was better to have some semblance of doubt than to be certain. He might never see the Doctor again. Since his memories of the future did not contain Eleanor, it was possible that they were not his at all, that they really were figments. This thought, that had been so chilling, suddenly became almost reassuring. For once God is dead, all one can do is to go work in the garden.

* * *

Tim was at his desk, writing with his good hand. The right had served him well enough once, but no longer. He could tense it only somewhat, and could not make a fist. He was writing down all of the memories, not chronologically, for they did not appear to him chronologically, so that the sequence became: the light fixture in the hospital, the memorial service, his baby-boyhood in long robes being dandled on a lap, the sound of shelling, the odd and very particular texture of the Norfolk grass filling his mouth as Hutchinson held him down and struck him in the back of the head (had that been the moment when something slipped loose?), mud, thick and suffocating, the memorial service again, the light glinting off a brown eye. After he could do no more with it, he rose and put his coat on.

He was a good-looking, though frail, man in his twenties. He was also a rather peaky-looking boy of fifteen, with large startled eyes and a sunken chest. He was also an old and withered man in the evening of his life. He was also a blond infant.

He opened the door. The air was cold, so he stopped to wind a scarf around his neck, and then left, placing the key under the flowerpot. It was a beautiful autumnal day. He walked up the track on the hill, towards the blue sky.

Tim couldn't say why he had come back here, but Hutchinson was the same. They had picked it over once, without coming to any definite conclusion. "But if I'd not come back here," Hutchinson had said, "I should not have married Jane. And you would not have found your Eleanor." Which was certainly true enough, except for the fact of Tim's uncertainty, the nagging feeling that he had. Eleanor was not in his memories of the future. They were few and far between enough that she might be there, in the gaps, a dutiful wife – for he did foresee a child someday – but he had not yet glimpsed her face. It made him sad. He did not talk to her about it.

Such a vivid day! The wind cast blackbirds, in spirals, across the newly-harvested fields. The blunt, severed stalks did not unsettle him as they would have done a year ago. They did not make accusations or ask questions. He had a corn dolly over the fireplace, its little light body a marvel to him. A year ago he would have wanted to break it in his hands, a futile, childish gesture. Eleanor had no time for futile or childish gestures, and that was why he was going to marry her, because he felt that she had common sense enough for both of them.

A blackbird landed a few yards away. No, not a blackbird, but a crow – he had never been good with perspective. He seemed to see everything pressed into two dimensions, as on a stage backdrop, so that he could never tell a small but immediate danger from a great one that was as yet very far away. The crow hopped along towards him. It opened its beak to emit a few strangled cries. Tim's face was frozen in a grin. He wanted to be light-hearted and smile at the creature, but he couldn't, because it was a carrion bird and they set him on edge. He wondered what Eleanor would say: it was perfectly natural to feel this way. Even men who had not seen what he had seen would feel this way. He need not hear the opening bars of another attack sounding grimly in his head. He grinned and grinned. The bird cocked its head at him, and then suddenly turned and sprang away.

With false jollity, he called after it, "So you want me to follow you, little fellow?"

The crow sprang into the air, but flew close to the ground. He darted after it, teeth gritted, sweat now gathering in the hollow of his back. Under the bright sun everything seemed unreal, and he began to apply a dangerous dream-logic to it all. The crow was leading him to something. He would follow the crow.

Down it led him, down the hill, his heels skidding on the soft soil, until he reached a little hollow in the hillside, and nearly tripped over his feet.

There was a reason for coming back here, one that he had not discussed. When the Thirty Years War had decimated the European soil, had ravaged the crops and scarred the land, there had been nothing to do but to till the earth again. So one drove one's plough over the bones of one's fallen companions, and did all one could to make the soil fertile again. There were precious few men from the village left. He and Hutchinson were not natives, but they must both have felt the creeping sense that they owed something to this place, and the same sadness at the thought of all the unwed maids and empty chairs. Sometimes Tim would fall asleep at his desk, if he had been writing until late the night before, and when he woke he would catch the faintest after-echo in the air, as though, until just a moment before, some very young person had been laughing.

He felt this same sensation when he saw the boy curled in the hollow, in his ragged clothes, with his too-familiar face, evoking everything that Tim had hoped to rid himself of.

* * *

"John Smith, a fellow fine,  
Cam t' shee a horse o' mine.  
Pit a bit upo' the tae,  
T' gar the horsie clim' the brae;  
Pit a bit upo' the brod,  
T' gar the horsie clim' the road;  
Pit a bit upo' the heel,  
T' gar the horsie trot weel."

He chirruped, as babies will. "Who's a good little boy?" He gurgled. "Yes, a good little boy, you are, aren't you?" Her voice had the lilt of the Hebrides. He liked it on her lap, but she put it him down. "Be a good boy now, for Christine's got to go and run an errand for your Mammy, yes she has." She put him before his playthings, where he sat lumpen and cross, but silent. It was only when she put the little wooden gun in his hand that he started to wail piercingly, and they could not say what had got into him.

"I was just coming to you, Mrs Latimer, ma'am."

"I believe you, Christine. The truth is, he has always been an hysterical child."

He heard the voices above his head but continued to wail. His face was red and snot was flowing from both of his nostrils so that he could hardly breathe, and he made little choked-sounding sobs.

"I din – I don't know what's got into him, ma'am, if you'll forgive my saying, it doesn't seem natural."

"I shouldn't worry, Christine. He only does it to vex us. Leave him, and he'll be quiet soon enough."

* * *

The boy sat at the oak table in the kitchen. There were heavy circles around his eyes, which were bright and relatively unchanged. He was still a boy. At the edges of his face, near his hairline, perhaps straying slightly across one cheek, were the little raised bumps of blackheads that had not yet bloomed. There was patchy hair on his chin, and above his mouth. Though confused and hungry and exhausted, his features still had a little of the hauteur that Tim remembered, and that had become so chilling in the hands of another. He was, in short, everything from before. Everything, all of them – his face conjured up all the other faces.

And he was hungry. He ate and ate. Tim gave him a loaf of bread, half of which he consumed with butter and cold beef, the other half of which was smothered with jam that Eleanor had made (in one of her more domestic moments). When he finished the loaf, he began to dig into the jam jar with his long fingers, and force the little globs of raspberry into his mouth, so that Tim leapt up quickly and provided him with a spoon. He drank small beer. He drank a jug of milk. After this he sat and looked at Tim in a way that suggested his hunger had not abated one whit, and cursorily mumbled, "Thank you."

"Baines," Tim said, the word feeling strange on his tongue. As yet he did not question the appearance of this boy, for he was still trapped in the dream-logic. It seemed to make perfect sense that on such a day, with such a cold wind blowing, and a bright blue sky, and the fields harvested of corn, someone might return from the dead. The other thing that prevented him from panicking as much as he might have done was the fact that this was undoubtedly Baines, and if it was not, it was not Son-of-Mine or Brother-of-Mine. What he saw before him was either a human creature or a ghost, but certainly nothing more sinister than that.

Baines nodded. Tim rose from the table and offered him a hand, which he took. When he stood, he was still taller than Tim by an inch or two. But where he was gangly and unformed, Tim was now a man. He knew it, and the knowledge made him melancholy.

They took the stairs slowly, Tim leading, up to the bathroom. The great porcelain bath was cold and empty. Tim returned downstairs for a moment, to fetch the pot of water that he had heated over the fire as they ate. When he returned he saw that Baines was simply standing in the centre of the room, as though he had forgotten everything about what one did in a bathroom. Tim upended the hot water into the bath, where it formed a small sad puddle at the very bottom.

Their eyes met momentarily. With a sigh, Tim went to him and helped him to remove his frock coat – for he was clad in the rags of his uniform. It was unbearable for Tim to even look at it, but he steeled himself, and helped him with the buttons and fixtures that his fingers were no longer familiar with. Kneeling to help him remove his broken shoes, Tim was struck by the look of his feet. They seemed particularly unfortunate.

As the youth climbed into the bath, Tim did not shirk from looking at his naked body. Indeed, he could not stop himself even if he had wanted to. Such a healthy, whole body, with legs that might have been a satyr's haunches for all their mysterious power, a small waist and angelic shoulder blades, was a curious thing. Doubtless such bodies still thrived in many places in the kingdom (for even in his despair, a detached part of Tim noted that the hysteria of others had perhaps exaggerated the damage, that even now it was being reduced to cliché by those who had not felt its sting), but in Tim's mind they had all been twisted and distorted. You are Adam, he thought, as he watched. You are the first man, in this land of crippled shadows.

There was nothing lascivious in his gaze. However, when Baines had crouched down into the bath, he turned and looked over its rim at Tim and said hesitantly, "Latimer?"

"Yes?"

"Would you – would you help me?" he said, and for a moment Tim felt a flicker of something, he knew not what. Of course, Baines was perfectly physically able, but if he was really Baines – if he had spent the best part of a decade imprisoned as Tim believed he had been – he might simply long to be touched by someone. So, not questioning the bizarre logic of this adventure, Tim went and leaned on the cold edge of the bath, and dipped his hands into the hot water, and rubbed the grey soap into a lather. It was a little painful to have to touch this body, to be sure, but he washed Baines' back gently. An odd mixture of scents assailed his sensitive nose. There was the smell of the grey flannel in his hand, the strong antiseptic odour of the soap, and some other component. Baines' body smelled strongly, but not of the usual bodily secretions. Straw was part of it, of course, because there was still straw in his hair. But there was something else, some very wild smell, of fields and crows and soil and the sharp cruel wind, perhaps.

At the base of his neck were a smattering of tiny pink zits threatening to burst into flame. Tim took the pot and dipped it into the water. "Close your eyes," he said gently, and poured it over Baines' head. His hair became a dark smear. Tim again rubbed the soap into a lather, and then mercilessly set about rubbing it into Baines' hair, making his head bob slightly with the motion. When he had washed it out with another potful of water, he stood back, and Baines rose to get out of the bath. Tim thrust a towel at him, but not quickly enough to avoid the sight of a trail of dark hair beneath the boy's navel, that trickled carelessly into a thick thatch between his legs.

Baines rubbed himself dry with the towel, and wrapped it around his shoulders like a cloak. His teeth chattered suddenly and violently, but before he began to get into the clothes laid out for him, he said suddenly, "I'm sorry."

Tim laughed unconvincingly. "Whatever for?"

* * *

Eleanor's house was perhaps the oddest that Tim had found himself in. Every surface was painted, had been painted by Eleanor herself, in muddy blues and greens and reds. He could spend an age examining the twin Blakean figures either side of the fireplace, their knotted thighs and placid faces. Between their heads, directly above the fire, was a chalice in which two fish swam; one light, one dark.

He flicked idly through one of her miscellaneous sketchbooks – she absolutely hated his doing that, examining half-finished sketches that he supposed were the visual equivalents of idle thoughts that had not borne fruit. And yet he sensed also that it pleased her. He was permitted to see things that no one else would ever see. He would always say to her:

"Now, what have you been up to?"

"Oh," she would say, and obfuscate for a few minutes, talk about the garden, about the plate she had drawn for some magazine or other, about news from Ireland (she was always alarmingly well-informed).

"Eleanor," he would say then, "you know exactly what I mean."

"Oh," she'd sigh, flustered, "you don't want to see that, I've produced nothing but rubbish…"

And then she would sit by him and knit or clean her brushes while he flipped through it. They would not speak. After the first few times he suspected that she anticipated this request of his and left little messages for him. Once it was a picture entitled 'Jacob and the Angel' (this scrawled beneath it in pencil): two figures, Blakean as was her wont, but one smaller and markedly frailer than the other. The frail figure was supporting the larger figure, whose foot was suggestive both of Byron's clubfoot and the torn tendon in the story that had given its name to the picture – and also of something else. These two figures were alone in a desolate wasteland. He assumed that this meant that she did not mind his friendship with Hutchinson half as much as she pretended to.

This time – he dropped the book.

"What is it?" Eleanor asked with a frown.

He calmly retrieved it from the floor. The page bore a picture of an old man's face, with a large crow-shape tattooed across it, wings spreading blackly beneath his eyes. He didn't know why it had troubled him so. Looking at it again, he realised how ridiculous he had been, and quickly turned the page.

"You are very distracted," she said sadly.

"Am I?" He had hoped he'd been hiding it well.

"I didn't mean just now. I meant always. But that's your cross to bear, my darling." She said this last as though she didn't like the thought at all, and frowned as she said it.

"Maybe it's my 'blood sacrifice'," he said, somewhat spitefully. He knew that upstairs, in the drawer of her dressing table, a mythical land upon which he had discreetly trespassed one afternoon, while she went (naked) downstairs to the larder to fetch them some chocolate, she had a letter that bore the signature of a certain P. Pearse.

"Now I know that whatever disturbs you is serious, Tim, because you try to divert my attention by starting a fight about the letter in my dressing table drawer, when I know perfectly well that you have read it, because you put everything back in the wrong order, and you dropped crumbs all over it." True enough – he had stolen another glance when they had finished eating. "Does it occur to you that Mr Pearse's letter may one day be worthy of exhibition in a museum? Alas, no longer; it bears the chocolate fingerprints of the cautious would-be libertine Timothy Latimer, of whom history will say nothing." She delivered all this in a deadpan tone, without looking at him. Then she looked up with what he realised was excitement – her dark eyes sparkled and her mouth was half-open. "Marry her?" Hutchinson had said bluntly. "Half Alice Liddell, half Maud Gonne…"

The sun was setting outside, and the orange light cast twisted, broken shadows across the room. "Tell me," she said, "is it the war you are thinking of? Or of whatever it was that happened at Farringham School? Tell me, please tell me." She slid out of her chair easily and shuffled on her knees to him, and smiled up at him. "Please tell me," she said.

* * *

He had told her once, about a strange Doctor he had known. He had shown her the watch. He told the story insofar as he could allow himself to; there were things that didn't bear mentioning, things that couldn't be explained in terms that would be easily understood. He knew when he told her that the thought crossed her mind that it was all just a figment of his imagination, that it was a story that had arisen when his mind had first been brutally twisted by experience. Yet she was familiar enough with Hutchinson to know that Tim had saved his life (and also to be somewhat jealous of their bond). He hadn't worried too much over it. It was one more thing that he couldn't explain, one more thing that couldn't be verbalised, one more spectre that haunted him. The comedy of the scarecrows' grotesque faces – it was comedy, Grand Guignol, Italian farce, in the light of the things he had seen since. It was still more hilarious in the knowledge of the memory that hadn't happened yet, but which he sensed in the next few decades: of looking at a picture of a box full of wedding rings, more rings than he could imagine, an unbearable multitude. But that memory was yet to come, and so he tucked it away in a dark recess.

* * *

After Baines had washed and dressed, in a pair of pyjama trousers and a jumper that Tim's aunt had knitted him under the illusion that, at the age of twenty, he would 'grow into' it, they sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. Eleanor had painted it for him, nothing intimidatingly Bohemian, just a sky blue, with some garlands of flowers here and there. The sun was streaming through the window and the room was the warmest in the house. Baines could sit and drink the best part of a pot of tea while Tim perused his writing. Except that Tim was not perusing his own writing, as he should have been. He was reading "Easter 1916" from the volume that Yeats himself had signed for Eleanor.

Eleanor had told him about this meeting, had spoken of the poet's handsome, distracted appearance. "Not handsome in the way that Byron was, to be sure," she'd said. "But he has eyes that have looked into the other world."

"He cultivates that appearance purely to seduce young women, then," Tim had replied tartly. "All this Irish mysticism – he's as English as you or me." This was one of his favourite ways to irritate her, for she had Irish blood, and some French, and with her dark eyes and hair liked to cultivate an exotic appearance. He suspected, as well, that she was a good deal more involved with Ireland than she liked to say.

"Easter 1916" – Eleanor had explained it to him, all the nuances. He understood it now in the way that most Englishmen, preferring to see it as a paean to violence, could not. He could look at it and see that it was a love letter, to Maud Gonne; he could see the Romantic tug-of-war between the sword and the pen, the pen and the sword. But the reason he was drawn to it just now was the notion contained within it of the stolen child. A children's treasury lay next to it, open at William Allingham's "The Fairies".

He sighed and looked up. Baines was staring morosely into the middle distance, at something Tim couldn't see. It was time to introduce the real waking world, and see if the dream would vanish. "Jeremy," he said kindly.

The somewhat cold blue eyes settled on his face inquisitively.

"I have a few things to see to. I'm going into town to get some more food, and then I'm going to pay a visit to a friend." He did not know why, but something always prevented him from referring to her as his fiancée.

Baines reflected upon this. "Do you want me to go?"

"No," Tim said hurriedly. "No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to give you that impression at all. I just wanted to warn you."

Baines nodded slowly.

Tim donned his scarf and coat once more and stepped outside into the real world. It was such an eerily calm day that he felt the rest of the town must be dead, but once he'd turned down into the square he was greeted with the usual bustle. He sighed. That was all his bread gone, and the leftover meat from Sunday, upon which he could have subsisted for most of the week by himself. He found himself making odd calculations – how much was it prudent to feed to a ghost who might yet be moving onto some other world? He did not make these calculations as though the boy was real and human.

He passed the village hall, where he had witnessed that fateful tea dance long ago, and saw delightedly that there was to be a meeting of Spiritualists in only a few days time. He might go – he might take his ghost too – and Eleanor would come along, of course, for she had nothing but contempt for the 'knuckle-crackers', as she called them. He walked on to the bakery, and it was there that he saw Joan Redfern.

She smiled at him, but wanly. Tim knew she did not like to talk to him, though she was always polite. People still talked, around the village, about the handsome young teacher at Farringham School who had very nearly made her a wife for a second time, only to wordlessly abandon her.

"Let me help you," Tim said quickly, for she was laden with shopping.

"I'm quite alright," she insisted, moving away. She laughed, a little awkwardly. "How are you, Tim?"

"Ah, I'm keeping well."

"Married yet?"

"Not yet. As soon as we've set a date, I shall let you know." After he said it he felt suddenly awful, as if it were a wounding sort of a thing to say, but she still smiled. "And how are you, Joan?" he asked gently.

"Quite well, yes," she said briskly. She was still a handsome woman, he noticed, and she made him blush. In his youth she had been the only woman at the school, and all of the boys had been somewhat in love with her. Now she had a few streaks of grey in her red-brown hair, but her bright eyes were the same.

When he had first come to the school, he had wet his bed every night for a week. The headmaster prescribed regular beatings to cure him of this. Joan had done something quite untoward; she had hugged him, once, in the infirmary. "Now, Tim," she had said, "the others are brutes, it's true, and it isn't very nice to have to make one's life amongst them. But you must always remember that I have to do the same, and that you and I are in the same boat."

They were still in the same boat.

It was quite a lot of shopping that she had, for a spinster, he thought as he helped her carry it. Her home was not far – couldn't have been far, in such a small town – and as they walked silently he debated whether or not to mention this. She might be losing her wits. Everyone said she was losing her wits. But was he not losing his?

When they reached her door, and he set the things down, he asked casually, "Planning a party?"

She looked at him, puzzled, and then realised. "Oh. Oh, yes, I suppose – a party of sorts. My cousin will be coming up from London, with her little girl, and they do eat an awful lot. Come to think of it, I might have overdone it." She laughed.

He laughed too. "Perhaps you ought to take them to the Spiritualist gathering at the hall, and give them a laugh at the expense of the gullible yokels."

Joan mused upon this rather seriously. "Yes," she said, "you know, I might. Yes, I think that would be rather a good idea."

Tim waited. She would, of course, ask him in for tea. He would decline, but she would ask, as this was the only polite thing to do. But she didn't. She only smiled at him, in an embarrassed manner, until he became so uncomfortable that he nodded to her and offered his hand.

To his surprise, she enfolded him in an embrace, and kissed his cheek. "Oh, Tim," she said haltingly, "you've grown into such a good man."

And with this, she went in.

* * *

Baines was still there when he returned. He didn't know what he had expected. He smiled awkwardly at the boy, who gave him a baleful glance.

"I'm sorry," he said softly. "I was bored."

"That's quite all right," Tim said, and went to put the bread in the larder.

Baines said, in the same sorrowful tone, "I read what you were writing, I hope you don't mind."

Tim did mind; his stomach pitched. But he said, "Not at all. I wrote it so that it might be read."

When he looked at Baines again, the boy's face was unreadable. After a moment, he said, "This war – this war that I missed – it was important, wasn't it?"

"It was the worst anyone living has seen," Tim said quietly.

"And you all went. And I was left behind."

Tim sat beside him and examined him carefully. "Would you prefer to have gone?" he asked, with palpable sarcasm.

Baines' face creased as though he had been wounded. "I don't know," he said, "I only know that I wish I hadn't been woken up. Or brought back. Or whatever it is that has happened. I don't want to live in this world, this world that you have described here, and since I am hardly equipped to…" He came, stuttering, to a halt.

Tim thought of letting him know that there were worse tragedies to come, and that he might have the pleasure of experiencing them along with everyone else, if he so wished. But he knew it would be unnecessarily cruel to say such a thing.

"And you think me a stolen child," he said bitterly. "It must seem dreadfully poetic to you. I am nearly a decade behind. Do you wish I had gone, and been crippled and twisted? Do you wish my sleep was ruptured by dreams of mud and agony? Am I an affront to you? Do you loathe me?"

All of those things, Tim wanted to say, but he didn't.

"Do you remember," Baines said, and a most unpleasant smile took hold of his face for a moment. Not an unearthly smile, just the unconscious smile of a bullying schoolboy, that was made horrid by its unconsciousness and the fact that it appeared in the midst of such a serious conversation. "Do you remember the time Hutchinson and I threw you against the wall, and you thought he was going to hit you, so you opened your mouth to say no, and I spat into your mouth? I spat right into your mouth, and the two of us found it so funny, I don't think I shall ever forget the look upon your face."

Tim did remember. It would have irritated him immensely were it not for the fact that he and Hutchinson were now such firm companions.

"Do you see what I mean? Do you see how useless I am? You ought to just snuff me out. No one else has seen me. Kill me, rid yourself of my corpse – it will be like I never existed."

Tim had not realised just how violently he disliked Baines until he found himself considering this. Perhaps before he had not remembered the petty bullying, the beatings meted out by the prefects, the intensity of their disgust for him, which had nothing to do with any external rebellion on his part and everything to do with the fact that they sensed his innate passivism – but this was because it was so insignificant. In the great scheme of things it meant very little. All had suffered, all had been punished, not in accordance with their crimes but simply randomly and without mercy, for such is the way of the world. But Baines had not. And so it was a very inviting thought, and he considered it for some seconds, until the boy made a little movement.

There was a smear of jam on the table, next to Baines' sleeve, and he moved his arm so as not to dirty the jumper. Tim came to himself quickly. He realised that this was a real creature before him, that this really was Baines – and just like anyone else, Baines didn't want to die. Tim knew this because for a long while, that was all he had wanted, or so he'd thought. But the body doesn't want to die. Where the spirit wavers, the flesh is always strong, the lungs always keep breathing, and the heart powers everything and never wants to stop.

* * *

"Never do that again," Hutchinson had said. The light fixture in the hospital. They had found him with vomit all over his clothes, his body's refusal to swallow all the pills he had forced into it. Tim had been very placid and had looked at the light fixture, which he had seen many years ago, in his dreams, and he had felt like the light fixture was talking to him. You can't escape that easily. You have a term to serve like anyone else, and you're all the luckier for knowing the length of the sentence and the day of the execution.

"Never do that again," Hutchinson had said, "I won't live in a world without you."

* * *

"I have to go out again," Tim reminded his guest. "You wouldn't like a little sleep?"

"I must say, I'm a bit tired," Baines said, and as if to prove his point, he gave a great silent yawn that twisted all his features and opened his jaw wide.

So again Tim led him up the stairs, to the spare room. This was where Hutchinson slept when he stayed, and where Eleanor pretended that she stayed, when in fact she would usually go greedily to Tim's own bed. It was a small but neat room, twice the width of the single bed it contained, with a chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. Above this, on the wall, was a mirror, at the sight of which Baines started back like a frightened cat. Tim went to turn it around, but Baines said quietly, "I'm sorry, but would you mind taking it away altogether?"

Tim acquiesced silently. As he was about to close the door, Baines, who had climbed into the bed and now lay swaddled in the thick sheets and eiderdown, said, "Latimer?"

"Yes?"

"You have really grown a great deal," he said quietly, and Tim closed the door.

Even Tim had trouble with mirrors. If only she didn't look like a little girl, it would be easy not to have any pity.

* * *

"What are you doing here?" she whined.

"Go away." He picked up one of the fallen apples, and threw it at her.

She didn't move. "You should be in school," she said accusingly.

"So should you."

"But you're a big boy, and you get to play with guns. My school is silly."

"Go away, Lucy," he snapped irritably. He leaned back against the tree and continued reading.

"If you don't go to school, how will you learn how to shoot the Sambos?"

He winced. "I don't intend to learn any such thing. Go away."

He looked up from his book to see her walking away, backwards, her wide eyes still fixed on him. After a certain point, she turned and ran, her hair in its two pigtails bobbing wildly.

* * *

He had to get back quickly, of course. Part of him prayed that the house would be empty – but no, his ghostly visitor was still lying, dead with sleep, in the spare bedroom. Tim lingered awhile in the doorway, then went and sat on the bed. Yes, he was corporeal. His chest rose and fell. His breathing was soft and moist like a child's, which was unsurprising, as he was still a child, Tim supposed. But it was an unbearably innocent sound, that soft intake and exhalation of air. Tim tried not to remember the very young boys that he had seen meet their ends, and failed.

Why this rehashing of the past? This endless reliving? Yet, after the crucifixion, men were said to be living anno domini, and Tim supposed helplessly that they were living now in the Year of the Great War. After the slaughter of one innocent, centuries ago, had come the slaughter of so many innocents that the world had been unthinkably changed. He knew, because the phrase would not leave him, that in time people who had never known such squalor would repeat sadly to one another, "Never such innocence again."

Yet it was not the loss of innocence that was the problem, it was the fact that there was nothing to replace it. There was no wisdom to be gleaned from the experience, the lesson being one that ought to have been learned years ago. Instead there was only appalling squalor, the sense of living as rats lived, of being no better than rats, of being unclean. That was why it was so hard to explain to anyone who had not been there, since they did not have the feeling of having somehow transgressed horribly against their own nature.

He and Hutchinson understood each other, but silently. And whereas Tim had to try very hard not to think of the war at awkward moments with Eleanor, when he kissed her or lay with her, he never had to worry with Hutchinson. They always thought of the war together. It was writ all over their bodies, in their hair, on their teeth, between each lash.

* * *

"I can still feel him inside me," Tim said, in front of the mirror. He wasn't sure to whom he addressed this remark. He beamed at his own beer-flushed face, and staggered slightly, regaining his balance with a little hop. He saw that he had a rather raw bite-mark on his neck.

They had been in the pub all afternoon and evening together, and on the way home Hutchinson had stopped him beneath the stars and pointed to something. He mumbled and laughed. His breath misted.

"What?" Tim had asked, and suddenly swayed violently. Hutchinson caught him. They smiled at each other. Then Hutchinson had put a very tender hand at the nape of Tim's neck.

* * *

"I can still feel him inside me," Baines said. He was sitting upright in his bed, his expression one of horror. "I didn't want to tell you before, because you might not think it was me. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that it is me. I can't remember what it felt like to be me, before…"

Tim had heard him screaming from the next room, and had rushed through with a candle that was now guttering wildly despite the fact that there was no draft. Tim wished that he had put curtains in this room. The expanse of black outside was too much.

Baines was nearly hysterical. His eyes were like the eyes of a horse that has bolted, an unthinking creature that has seen something it ought not to have seen. "That is to say, I mean, I… before, when it was him, not me, I was like a dream in his mind. And now he is a dream in mine."

Tim shushed him gently.

"And he's so sad," Baines said, "because he almost doesn't exist, because he had what he wanted before, and I took it, or that man, the crow man, took it. And he's so sad because his mother and father are gone, and his sister, his sister…"

"Jeremy," Tim said, taking the boy's hand in his, "I know that it is you. You've had a nightmare."

"How can you know that it's me when I don't know that it's me?"

It was just the sort of question that a child will ask and that an adult cannot reasonably hope to answer.

"And even if it is me," Baines said bitterly, accusingly, "what does that matter? What good am I, exactly? I should either have died, with the rest; or still be trapped, suspended, nothing but a shadow in the mind of – him – the other one."

"So what you're saying," Tim said, slowly, sternly, for it seemed the only possible way to respond, "is that you didn't ask to be born?"

"Bloody hell, Latimer..."

"It's all the same," Tim said. "You are here. You are alive. And aren't you grateful? Don't you just keep gulping down every breath? Of course you do." But Baines was so shaken that Tim leaned close to him and said, in a manner that he hoped was kind, "Don't you think that I feel the same? I still can't understand how it is that I came to be here."

* * *

When Tim slept he dreamt that he was in a castle. He was opening the door to a room he was forbidden to enter. He fumbled with the key. When he opened it, he found it empty, but for one thing – there was a crow nailed to the wall, a nail through each of its wings and one through its throat, and it was crying piteously. 


	2. Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?

OK, so - more. I apologise for how lengthy and verbose this is, and the non-appearance of the Doctor thus far, but don't worry! The chapters are hopefully going to be successively shorter. I can't do anything about the pretentiousness, however (this title is taken from a line in Blake's "The Lamb") and I rather suspect that the slash might get a little worse. Please read, stick with it, and review, even if only to point out how unreadably lengthy and verbose it is and how you couldn't possibly read to the end. Cheers.

* * *

'Where is she? Where is she? This old woman is hiding her from me. She's bored by me, and she's waiting for me to go, thinking it all an infernal nuisance, these crowding memories and this returning ghost…'  
- Collette, _The Last of Chéri_

On these magic shores children at play are forever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.  
- J.M. Barrie, _Peter Pan and Wendy_

* * *

Now she thought about the watch. Just turning it over, over and over, opening, closing, turning, click, but the watch itself never ticked. It was just an old piece of tat, yet he insisted on keeping it, and when once she had said to him sharply, "If you are going to be going on with that while I am telling you about Mr Shaw's play, I simply shan't bother", Hutchinson had snapped at her that she didn't know what she was talking about. 

But to pacify her, Tim no longer took it with him in his pocket, for it tempted him too much to play with it. Now it rested on the mantel in the parlour, and sometimes she saw him looking vaguely towards it while she was talking to him.

She did not like the watch because it was something between him and Hutchinson, a sort of a physical remnant of whatever affection it was that they bore each other. But she knew there was something else bound up with it, something about this Doctor who had masqueraded as one of the schoolmasters at Farringham, and she resented this even more. She felt she ought not to have to stand meekly by while he divided up his love between Hutchinson and this Doctor and the maid, what was her name? Martha, and Joan Redfern, and then accept whatever he had leftover. It just wasn't fair. He wasn't under her spell at all.

* * *

He and Hutchinson had once gone back to the school. They stood at the end of the long drive, the grass now overgrown, and looked down towards the great empty building. Tim wanted to go further. Hutchinson held back. 

"I thank God that it's dead now," Tim said feverishly, for he saw it like a great monster made of stone, welcoming in little boys with gently smiling jaws.

"I don't know," Hutchinson mused. "It's another thing that – well, you know."

That no one else would be able to understand, that was lost to the old world, that had never made it into the new world. It had no place in the new world. The delicate mechanical rounds of its toy soldiers now seemed quite ridiculous. When Tim remembered it now, it seemed like some distant medieval abbey, its male inhabitants 'amorous but not erotic' (a neat phrase from a Carthusian headmaster), its rites solemn and mysterious.

"Besides," Hutchinson chided him with a smile, "you don't believe in God."

Tim grinned, but could not take his eyes from the school. "I believe in God," he said carefully. "I just don't believe he's here."

* * *

Tim realised that he had convinced himself of something very peculiar. He had metamorphosed Joan Redfern's cousin and her little girl into the Doctor and Martha. Something in her manner had convinced him of this, as well as the fact that he hoped desperately that it was true. He knew he had dreamed of them. It was only when he woke properly that he realised he had got this notion from Barrie's Peter Pan. 

He was lying at the very edge of Baines' bed – he hadn't felt able to leave him, and though he felt frankly terrified with him and knew that if he could only swaddle himself in his own bedclothes, with the drawn curtains instead of the gaping dark, he might get a little sleep, he had stayed with him. He was an adult. It was his responsibility not to be afraid of the dark, and so he had lain there precariously at the edge of the bed (there couldn't be anything worse than _touching_ the boy, to be sure) and had very little sleep. Even in this very uncomfortable position, he had managed to dream. He had wakened frequently. When he was not awake he was dreaming. When he was not dreaming he was looking at Baines' dim form, with its back turned to him, and once, when he was not sure whether he was dreaming or not, the bed had been empty. That had frightened him so much that he had simply closed his eyes and willed it not to be true. And lo, it wasn't. The sun had risen and was slanting in through the windows, and the birds emitted their shrill cacophony, and the boy from the world before the war was snoring peacefully. Tim felt something in his hand, and jumped.

It was Baines' hand.

The day was clear, though the frost was beginning to creep in. Tim had been delighted, upon rising and going to the kitchen, to see a hart in the garden. He wished that such moments could take the place of all the other memories – instead of the light fixture in the hospital, the memorial service, and so forth, he could have geese crossing the sky in a v-shape, the trees ablaze with blossom in April. Again he was troubled by the fact that his memories of the future did not involve Eleanor, and now that Baines had entered his life, did not involve the Doctor.

Baines needed to shave. Tim did almost suggest that he do it himself, but he knew it would be cruel to say such a thing, when he knew how unsettling a mirror could be. So he lathered Baines' face, and took the long razor in his hand, and did it for him. He was glad that Baines' eyes did not meet his, for he might have been distracted and embarrassed enough to cut him. Thinking of this, he felt a sudden desire to do just that. He could not say where it came from. He wanted to disfigure Baines, to harm him, to change him. His hand shook a little; then he continued.

They ate breakfast together in silence. Eventually, Tim cleared his throat and said, "I must go into town again and leave you by yourself."

The boy looked at him dully. His expression was such that Tim expected, or wanted, him to whine, "Please don't leave me, I shall be so frightened." But in fact he said, "What exactly do you do?"

Tim started. "I'm sorry?"

"What do you do? For money? What is your job?"

"Why, I write, of course. I have regular engagements with two different journals, and then others who allow me to write a piece whenever the mood takes me. So, for example, I do write for a military publication, awfully dry stuff, but it brings regular money - all the things that they taught us under the misapprehension that they still applied, Jena and Waterloo and Blenheim, Blenheim for God's sake. And then the piece that you read yesterday – the Yeats piece – might go to a literary journal if they want it."

Baines digested this information. And then he said, with some of his old impenetrable self-assurance, "I say, you really make enough money out of scribbling to get by?"

Tim didn't know how to reply. He was wrong-footed. "Well, I seem to," he muttered hesitantly.

"And what will you do when you marry, if you do marry?" It was like having this conversation with his father.

"As it happens I shall be marrying rather soon," Tim said, regaining himself, "and although I certainly don't need to justify myself to you, you might be interested to know that my fiancée has her own income. And that, when she turns thirty, she will be permitted to vote."

Baines looked aghast at this. He pushed his food around his plate, and Tim could not suppress a snigger at his expense. Then Baines said, "You didn't mention before, that you have a fiancée."

"Didn't I? I expect it didn't come up."

"It didn't come up," Baines persisted, "because you didn't mention it. I'm sure you didn't mention it because she is not only hideous but stupid and probably blind too, and so I quite forgive you. Well if you are going out you had better go. I expect I am probably entirely in your head, and when you come back I shan't be here at all." He was jealous. It was obviously another way in which his old companions had grown, and he had remained unchanged.

"Oh, now, you mustn't say that. You are here, and you will be here, for whatever reason. You've just to get on with things. Perhaps you are imagining me, and I am not really here at all?" He meant it light-heartedly, but he saw he had really frightened the boy. Perhaps it made him think that he might still be tied to that post, and that whatever little fragment of him remained trapped in the mind of the other creature had simply gone insane.

"I don't think so," Baines said, "I don't have a very good imagination. You write, I mean you wrote, all of my English work for me, don't you remember?"

Tim had forgotten about that. He remembered peppering the exercises with liberal spelling mistakes, trying hard to adopt the appearance of a mind that had flashes of rough brilliance, but lacked the eloquence to properly express these. Baines had thumped him to encourage him, but honestly he had acted of his own free will. It intrigued him to be able to invent a literary persona for Baines, to suggest things about him that probably were not at all present in reality – to create for Baines the kind of mind that he wished Baines had. It had made him wish he could do this for everyone, subtly rewriting them. He need only start small, and then work his way up to the headmaster, to whom he could ascribe a great and sensitive unwillingness to fight. Then he might move on to the politicians, and to the Kaiser, and he could stop the war before it started.

* * *

He liked to imagine that his father's moustache would tickle, but he had never had the opportunity to discover whether it would. His father did not touch him, did not touch him even to beat him, and barely looked at him. But he had imagined that it would tickle, and now, at eleven, he had the memory of its doing so despite the fact that it had never happened. 

His father had not returned to see him before he went to Farringham, it had simply worked out that way by coincidence. He remembered his father from when he had been a baby, but he remembered him tall and godlike. It was quite a shock to him, at eleven, to realise that he had his slight build from his father, who was almost a _delicately_ tiny little man, rather like (Tim's mind ran on dreamily) Napoleon must have been, and Tim was the exiled son of Napoleon, the Eaglet, and he was to be imprisoned by the brutish Metternichs…

In a voice that was like a slap, but without touching, his father barked, "Listen when I'm talking to you. Dear God."

The disappointment in his voice would have made Tim's chin wobble, but he was bright enough to realise that this might be a mistake on his part, and kept a straight face.

"Well, I can't blame your mother." Tim's mother was dead by now. "And by all accounts you have attended the right sort of schools, and done well enough."

Tim focused on the floor and said nothing, did not move a whisker.

"You see, the trouble is, Timothy, that it is not good enough to simply be adequate. You might think that you have been very clever in keeping your head above water, but I assure you, everyone _knows_. They can tell by looking at you. They can tell that you have no honest fervour in your heart. And since it is plain that you have had all the means at your disposal to become a good, honest boy, with a bit of pluck, a bit of fire in his belly, you must ask yourself, who made you this way? Hmm? Who made you the deceitful creature that you are?"

Tim looked up. He felt that he knew the right answer to this. "God made me this way," he said, in a rather pathetic squeaky voice that he didn't recognise as his own.

His father did not roar, but his eyes were full of fury. "What?" he said disgustedly. "What did you say?"

"God made me this way," Tim said, and too late realised that he was merely repeating catechism, and that this was not the answer to the question at all.

"God did not make you this way, Timothy – you have only yourself to blame."

* * *

"A little mercy," said Eleanor, "can be a dangerous thing."

She and Jane were sitting before the fireplace in the old house in which Jane and Hutchinson lived. It was Tudor, had been in the family for that long, though there had always been a manor house here and Jane could trace her family back to the Normans. Jane had a long Plantagenet face, long dark gold hair, and moved with the stylised gestures of her ancestors. Eleanor liked her very much. She seemed to exist in all times continuously.

"I think we dote on them too much. And I think that they resent us, because we couldn't go – which is, God knows, not our fault. If we had been men we would have gone, and if they knew, as you know, how I often I dream that I am a man… But I can't tell him that, and anyway, it would mean nothing to him. They think that they are the only ones who have seen bloodshed, or at least, they don't care to remember that we have too. You, while you were a V.A.D., and I – "

She didn't finish this sentence. Jane could tell that she thought she was hiding something well, because she underestimated her companion. Jane was not an intellectual, and not as refined intellectually as Eleanor, for all her good breeding. But Jane knew that Eleanor had been out of the country in 1916. When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, what stalked through the Post Office?

It was time to change the subject. "I find myself quite interested in Spiritualism," Jane said.

"Oh, that? Each to their own. I expect I shall have to go, because Tim seems rather interested, but I don't know who would wish to talk to the dead."

"If I could talk to my brother," Jane said, "I think I would."

Eleanor was suddenly penitent. She hesitated and then embraced the other woman. "I'm so sorry," she said into her hair, as Jane hugged her equably back, "I wasn't thinking of that. I haven't been thinking. Sorry, I've been awfully wrapped up in myself."

"It's quite alright," Jane replied, unruffled. "Doubtless, for you, there are so many ethical dilemmas surrounding the whole notion – ought one to talk to the dead? And no doubt you would be thinking of Orpheus and Eurydice, or perhaps the more obscure Egyptian version of the same myth, or something like that. But for me, well, I simply didn't talk to him enough while he was here, he was _so_ young, and _so_ stupid, if I could have him back even for a minute I would.

"And I feel quite secure in saying that even if it had dreadful consequences for everyone else, I would have him back for that one minute."

* * *

Jane loved her husband and he did not love her. She had accepted this readily, since it was such a small price to pay for having a husband at all in these desolate times. Besides which, he was a war hero! She worshipped him and decided to live off her worship of him. He did not respond to her love, and so she would be like the pelican that tears chunks from its breast in order to feed its young. In her youth she had read the story of Geraint, King Arthur's knight, who believed his wife to have been unfaithful and lashed her to the saddle of his horse, and made her follow him across the land. In the end it all came right; and this would all come right too, when he realised just how much she cared. She had a very old oaken cradle in the nursery upstairs, in which she had slept as a baby, and she knew that her own child would sleep in this cradle. Oh, soon, soon, it would happen soon enough. Of course she envied Eleanor, who was already so familiar with dainty little Tim Latimer, but she herself was not like that. She would wait. It would be her cross to bear. She would be like those medieval ladies, with white hands, who sat sewing tapestries and waiting for their lords to return from the Crusades. 

Of course, her love had already returned from the Crusades. But he had not _returned _yet. His mind had not returned. His heart had not returned. She imagined it would come one day, in a little wooden chest, oh, perfumed and beautiful.

And then he would love her.

* * *

Tim hurried along into town. He had a rather glorious truant-from-school sort of feeling, that he soon realised came from possessing so many secrets. It was as though Baines' presence had crystallised all of the other secrets, made them more concrete – it was as though every little dark wending lane had met at a crossroads. He whistled to himself contentedly.

* * *

He had made a habit of sneaking away from school whenever he got the chance. For instance, during games, he was often not missed, since they went out to the fields in any case. And though he had a hot feeling of dread in his stomach because Hutchinson had said to him, with a sneer, "You were sick again last week, Latimer? I didn't see you on either team", he was determined at least to miss this lesson before he got caught. 

Baines had said to him, "I say, what's that in your shorts?"

"Nothing," Tim had replied, nervously, adding, "Why, do you want to have a look?" in as surly a manner as he possibly could.

"That's disgusting. Why would I want to look at your little knob? Latimer's a poof," Baines said in one breath, the last clause shouted so that Hutchinson could hear it across the changing room.

"I know," came the reply.

"And his knob's all flat and rectangular."

"I know."

Now Tim hurriedly removed Plato's _Symposium_ from his shorts, and sat down, with his back against the fence post, to read it. It was a bright day, the hawthorn trees along the fields edge heavy with blossom. He was only a few pages in when a shadow loomed across him, and he looked up to see Clark peering down at him. The farmer said, "You're one of the schoolboys."

Tim nodded, terrified.

"You meant to be in school now?"

"Yes, sir, Mr Clark."

The farmer chewed his moustache thoughtfully. "Which lesson?"

"Games, sir."

"Eh, rugger and cricket and all of that? That's no lesson. What are you meant to get from that?"

Tim's voice became bored as he reeled off the whole list. "Physical stamina, fresh air, camaraderie, a sense of fair play and honour, a desire to defend the school values and therefore the values of the empire…"

The farmer thought a moment longer. "Come with me," he said, "and I'll teach you something useful."

So Tim followed him back towards the farmhouse, and it transpired that one of the ewes was pregnant, and Mr Clark showed him how to help with the lambing. Tim was delighted at the tender little blind, helpless creatures, who butted at their mother almost violently. Afterwards, Mr Clark gave him sweet, milky tea in a chipped cup, and a slice of bread and butter, and Tim was so overjoyed and thankful that the farmer was quite bemused.

And when Tim got back to the school it was so late that he did not even bother to hide the book from the others, and Hutchinson beat him rather too soundly with a piece of knotted rope, while Baines read aloud from the book and sniggered at anything he considered to be lewd.

"Asistoph – Aristiph –"

"Aristophanes," Hutchinson corrected him boredly.

"That's exactly what I meant. Latimer, are you in love with Socrates?"

Tim's bottom was sore. He had heard that another boy had hidden a piece of tin inside his pants to protect his tender flesh, but that the clanging had given him away, and he had been beaten all the more soundly. He rubbed his bottom ruefully, and just at that moment he had looked over his shoulder and seen Hutchinson watching him really quite intently. Baines was lolling stupidly, holding the book over his head and squinting up at it.

"Yes," Tim muttered tersely, holding Hutchinson's gaze.

"Ahahaha. You're in love with Socrates. You're a poof," Baines cackled.

"Yes. I am."

Hutchinson did not waver. In Tim's mind the two memories began to get rather confused, the sting of the rope and the boneheaded bullying, and the growing sense that Hutchinson's hatred of him sprang from something quite unmentionable, and the butting of the wet, pink lambs against their mother, and the way the small creatures with their tender hooves felt in his hands, and the children of the sun and the moon and the earth, and the great abbey that was Farringham School.

* * *

"There's a thing," Eleanor said, "on his mantel." 

"Oh yes? What manner of thing?"

"A sort of – a fob watch. He's really quite silly about it. The two of them, they have this notion that it's very special. But it's just a broken watch."

Jane shrugged gracefully. Eleanor had a sort of intense look in her eyes, and said suddenly, "Let's go and get it."

Jane laughed. "And why should we do that, if it's just an old broken watch?"

"Oh goodness, Jane, you can't say that you aren't curious," Eleanor cried, "that you aren't even the least bit curious about any of his secrets."

* * *

When Eleanor had first met Tim, he had been idly turning the watch over and over in his hand – opening, closing it, opening it again, turning it over – as though looking for something. It was a very compulsive movement and almost hypnotic. She thought it sort of charming. 

It had been at a dinner party in Cambridge, held by a playwright of whom neither Tim nor Eleanor was particularly fond. She thought there was something familiar about him, but it was he who looked up at her and said shyly, "I say, it is you, isn't it? You live in that little house and all the old biddies gossip about you in town."

"They do?" she said, feigning ignorance.

"Oh yes," he said, with a sly sort of a smile. "Truth be told, I've been avoiding you for fear that if I met you I'd fall under your spell."

"And now meeting me must be a great relief."

"Certainly. I think if I were to fall under anyone's spell, I should want it to be yours, and it is rather a relief to fall under someone's. It does absolve me of the fact that I've almost certainly shocked you deeply by going on like this without introducing myself. You say, 'But you've shocked me deeply by going on like this without introducing yourself.'"

She smiled and repeated what he had said, but in a deadpan tone, for he must not think that she was impressed. But she was impressed. And when he took her hand and smiled at her and said, "I'm sorry, terribly rude of me. My name is Timothy Latimer and I am thoroughly under your spell, or I shouldn't have been quite so remiss", she blushed, and she very nearly simpered.

Tim was the only person who could make her very-nearly-simper. That was how she could tell that there was something that was not quite right about him, something that had never quite been right, as though he had been made slightly differently to everyone else. Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped; and no earthly gentleman could get the better of Eleanor, so it followed that Tim must be quite extraordinary in some way.

* * *

Tim usually went into town at around half-past ten, Eleanor knew, because he needed the air. He was something of an ascetic – up at six, writing until half-past ten, the brief walk into town, lunch, and then resumed writing until six in the evening. At this point, he and Hutchinson would often go to the pub, or he might visit Eleanor. If he planned to return home (and he did not always plan to), he would go straight to bed with some ridiculous book on the use of the oblique order of attack in ancient Greece and Frederician Prussia, and when his eyes grew weary he would add it to the mounting pile of books that lay beside him. 

So she and Jane went down to the house at a quarter to eleven, and found the door locked. Eleanor smiled and removed the key from its place beneath the flowerpot; she and Jane were almost clamouring now. It was not clear to them what they would do, but they knew they would do something. Perhaps they would look through Tim's letters, or Eleanor would show Jane the picture that Hutchinson had lent to his friend: a daguerreotype of a naked youth wearing ram's horns, in some cod-mythological pornographic scene. Except that Eleanor was not sure that Jane would find this as funny as she herself did (particularly when she considered that the two men might be attempting to give their own activities a Wildean frisson of danger), and rather thought she might cry at the sight of it. And part of Eleanor quite wanted to show it to her regardless of this.

But first they went straight to the mantel. "He hides it under this idiotic corn dolly, you see? And when I talk to him sometimes, I can _see_ him looking longingly towards it. He won't credit me with having _eyes_."

She turned the watch over the way he did, examining the markings. She opened it, closed it. She handed it to Jane, who examined it similarly and said, "But why is it so important? It's broken."

And then the stairs creaked violently. "The wind," Eleanor said, and as if to disprove her, they did so again, but this time with the defiant thud of a footfall overlapping the creak.

"There's a cat that gets in sometimes."

"Must be a bloody great cat," whispered Jane, her eyes wide. "Perhaps Tim isn't out."

"But the door was locked."

"Let's just leave, please."

The noise had ceased. But it had not been replaced by silence. Instead there was the sound of something keeping very quiet indeed. "Hello?" Eleanor called. "Tim?" she added hopefully. "Puss cat?" she said, and tried to laugh, but Jane looked at her so solemnly that she stopped.

Then the unmistakeable sound of human feet pounding up the stairs, and Eleanor's heart was in her mouth. She ran to the door that led into the corridor.

"Eleanor!" Jane hissed frantically. "What if it's a burglar?" But she followed Eleanor anyway; she had no choice.

The upstairs landing was dark, but light streamed from the spare bedroom, the door of which was wide. Outside the window, clouds ran like pursuing dogs across the blue sky. The crows could be heard clearly, and their crying seemed to have grown more frenzied. The bed was unmade.

Eleanor crept into the room, Jane clinging to her arm. "Hello?" she said tentatively. "I warn you, you won't find anything worth stealing." The words sounded hollow.

She looked about. There was still the same uneasy feeling in the air, but the room appeared undisturbed. The air felt stale. The dust was unshaken. She bent down to look under the bed, but there was no one and nothing there – except –

"Christ," Eleanor said, pulling it out.

"What's that?" Jane asked, quavering.

"It's the uniform they used to wear, isn't it? Dear me." She had separated out the frock coat, the trousers, the dress shirt, the waistcoat, the tie. She sniffed it. "Oh, how horrible!"

"What? What's wrong?"

"Well, it isn't Tim's," Eleanor clarified, "it's far too big. And it smells – smell it."

She handed the frock coat to Jane, who sniffed tentatively, and shuddered. "It smells like a corpse," she said.

"Eleanor," Jane sobbed, "you mustn't say that."

Eleanor shushed her, and then sat on the floor gazing thoughtfully at the clothes. It was like opening an old locket to find a single curl of golden hair that crumbles when touched. Even the crows had fallen silent now. Eleanor got to her feet and took Jane's hand gently, and they descended the stairs.

"Let's leave."

"In a moment." Eleanor went through to the kitchen, where Tim's writing implements and papers were strewn across the table. She took his pen, and a scrap of paper on which he had begun to write "Although the Oisin myth is undoubtedly a myth – just as Orpheus, Urishima Taro et al are myths – after all there is no magic hawthorn tree with a door in its trunk", and wrote in bold letters:

You have a ghost. Good luck, Eleanor


	3. Thought and Memory

And more. Again, do please review. I didn't intend to mention the Easter Rising quite so much, only this time last year I was cramming myself full of that stuff for my exams, and I don't think I've shaken it off yet. Oh yes, and Thought and Memory (Hugin and Munin) are Odin's two ravens, who fly over the word and observe things for him.

* * *

The whole world wide, every day,

fly Hugin and Munin;

I worry lest Hugin should fall in flight,

yet more I fear for Munin.  
- _Grímnismál_

And then came the battle goddess Morrigu and her sisters in the form of scald-crows and sat on his shoulder. "That pillar Is not wont to be under birds," said Erc son of Cairbre.  
- _The Death of Cuchulainn_

* * *

No one had realised that anything was amiss because there had in fact been several instances of boys from the school, invariably bored or drunk or both, donning the scarecrows' rags and lurching about in them. There was very little to work with, in terms of pranks. Once Jenkins and Hutchinson had tied a bag over Tim's head and threatened to lash him to the scarecrow's post up on the hill. Tim was silent. He pictured himself, a silent sentinel. He imagined himself being tied to a cross like Christ. He made his body very limp and still. Before his eyes (though there were no eyeholes in the bag) he saw the seasons pass wearily. 

"You've suffocated him, you bloody fool," he heard Hutchinson cry angrily. And then Jenkins' fingers fumbled hurriedly with the string.

When they lifted the bag, he grinned weakly at them. They said nothing, embarrassed that he had tricked them, and pleased that he was not suffocated, but with no intention of admitting it. Hutchinson glared at him.

* * *

"Oh, good boy! Good little man!" 

He had stuck close by his nurse all along the crowded platform, and now they boarded the train. He was all clad in black, with a lace collar, as was she, but he did not care that his mother was dead. Or, he thought it very sad that the lady called Mother should have died, but he was too fond of his nurse to properly remember this.

He sat up beside her in the carriage and sang the train song. "We are going on the train. The man is driving the train. The train goes wooooo, woooooo…"

At this, some of the other passengers looked around, and Christine said, "Now, that's a very nice song, Timothy, but I think perhaps you had better be still and quiet. Where is your book?"

Everyone was impressed by the fact that so little a boy could read, but to his dismay, they only gave him books about brave boys who went to slay wicked tribesmen. He made a face. "I don't like it. I want to play a game."

She thought, her head on one side. Then she put out her hand, which she had made into a sort of a fist, but for the gap left between index and middle fingers. She said, in a singsong voice, "Put your finger in the corby's hole, the corby's not at home." He put his small finger into the gap between her two fingers. Suddenly she closed them, squeezing his finger, not so that it hurt but so that it shocked him. "Oh! The corby's at the back of the door, chewing a bone!"

"Christine?"

"Yes?"

"What's a corby?"

"A crow," she said.

* * *

"That maid," Hutchinson said to Baines, "you know, the darkie?" 

"Oh yes."

"Nice arse. Of course, she's an animal – but still, it's a nice arse. You, are you doing my Latin?"

Tim nodded slowly.

"Then don't eavesdrop on my conversation."

Tim returned placidly to the work before him. He actually quite enjoyed it, Latin and Classics and Literature – what he hated was having to do the prefects' History work. It was so hard for him to construct an argument different to the one that he would use in his own work, for when he argued he always felt that his view was the most commonsensical and most easily supported. If it were not, it would not be the right view for him to take. And there was only so much jingoism that he could cram into the work of the other boys before it began to sound like a caricature of braying upperclassmen rather than the genuine article.

As it happened, he had not been eavesdropping until Hutchinson drew his attention to it, and now he could not stop listening.

"There's a woman over on the High Street that Jenkins knows who will do it," Baines said.

Hutchinson snorted. "But it's Jenkins – can you imagine the sort of creature that he would offer up for such a purpose?"

Baines shrugged. "It's just a hole, really. I don't know why you're so picky."

"Just a hole – honestly, you're such a freak, I don't know why you don't take a crack at Jenkins himself. Or Latimer. Latimer looks like a girl."

Baines made a vomiting noise and the two of them laughed hysterically. But Hutchinson's laughter was just a little too strained and desperate, because Hutchinson had wanted Tim to hear all this dreadfully masculine badinage, and wanted him to be excluded from it. Tim's sudden clarity with regard to Hutchinson's attitude toward him did not make him any fonder of the other boy; nor did it give him any hope that Hutchinson would not seriously break one of his limbs at some point. No one would care. Tim's father wouldn't be interested in such news, whereas Hutchinson's parents (doting types, a powdery mother and a stout father) would defend to the death their son's right to break the bones of anyone who crossed his path.

"Perhaps you'll let me in on the joke? It seems very amusing," came a crisp voice from the doorway.

It was Smith, the History master, known to the boys as Beanpole Smith for the simple reason that all the masters had to have nicknames, and he was very tall and very skinny.

The two boys straightened up. "Uhhh," said Baines.

"That's alright, Baines, don't exhaust yourself trying to devise a plausible lie," Smith said. His eyes fixed on Tim. "I only came by to have a word with Latimer." He beckoned. Tim got wearily to his feet and followed him out. As he went he heard a stifled giggle, and turned to see Hutchinson smirking at him while Baines made a ridiculous gesture involving the thumb and forefinger of one hand, in the shape of a ring, and the index finger of the other.

Tim followed Beanpole to his office, where he was offered a seat. He said nothing. He knew better than to ask if he might be in trouble. Smith sighed across the desk at him. "What am I to do?" he asked. "On the one hand, I cannot help but admire the sheer ingenuity that you have employed in writing essays for no less than five people."

"Five, sir?"

"Including yourself, naturally." Smith leaned back. "That's an adopted personality as much as any of the others," he mused, distantly. Then his sharp eyes focused once more on the boy. "Yet on the other hand," he said, "I can't say that it is strictly _allowed_."

Tim felt suddenly bold. There was something about Smith that made him feel immediately more himself – not that he was sympathetic, or friendly, exactly – but Tim felt that they had some sort of affinity. "If I may, sir?"

"You may, Latimer."

"Surely it doesn't matter all that much. I mean, it is that much more of a challenge for me, it means that the work is done, and you know that they wouldn't be learning or absorbing anything anyway."

Smith leaned across the table. Tim felt suddenly ashamed of having said such a thing. "Do you really think that makes it alright?" Smith asked. "Really, do you? Do you think that the physically strong possess the right to trample upon the physically weak? And do you think that your mental superiority affords you moral superiority over someone like Baines, with all the intellect of a particularly witless dog?"

Tim was embarrassed. He really had grown accustomed to thinking that way, suffering the physical injuries inflicted on him by the others, drawing solace from what he saw as his own superiority.

"It must sound hypocritical from my lips, given my position as teacher, but I would have thought that you might try, with that great brain of yours, to think of both yourself and of others as human. Do you understand? It is the most sublime and the most ridiculous and the most deeply abhorrent thing, to be human. It means making war upon each other. It means writing poetry. Which is why, first and foremost, I would recommend that you pay attention to what I teach you, because even when it seems repulsive or wasteful, it is always important. And also why I would insist that you allow the others to grasp these lessons on their own. Because they can. They are perfectly capable, so long as you do not take it upon yourself to carry the burden of this knowledge alone."

It was a very fine and very rousing speech, Tim thought as he was dismissed. He wanted to believe it, he wanted to follow its precepts. But could not quite

He moved quickly out of the doorway to allow Nurse Redfern to pass. Smith might seem rather high-minded, but he certainly spent a lot of time with the widow, and people had begun to talk.

When he returned to the Common Room, it was bustling. All the boys whose work he did were there, sitting on desks and flicking paper at each other and making great noisy eructations and generally behaving like the boors they were.

"What did he say?" Hutchinson demanded, alert as ever. Baines and Jenkins were kicking each other, but they (and the other boy who depended on Tim for his history essays, Phelps) fell silent, waiting for his answer.

"Oh, he just said that your work was improving and wanted to know if I'd helped you. I said no."

"You better have," Hutchinson said, standing to loom menacingly over Tim.

"And I did," Tim repeated calmly. He cast a glance at the other four, and then, to distract them, said something that he couldn't forgive himself for afterwards. "He didn't have time to say much, because Nurse Redfern came in and he hurried me out."

They all nodded sagely. "God, how pathetic," Jenkins snorted, "going after someone like old Beanpole. She must be desperate. I don't think he even knows you can use it for that."

Tim was blushing madly. "Yes," said Hutchinson, laughing. "She'll say," (here he adopted a high pitched voice) "'Oh John, you must tell me if you are a virgin, I shan't mind', and he'll say," (his voice dropped several octaves and became an irritating drone, with teacherly emphasis) "'Well, Joan, in nineteen-oh-_three_, John Smith _did_ attempt, intercourse, with a prostitute (colloquially _known_ as a _goose_, or, lady of the night), but, due to his in_adequate _equipment, the endeavour, failed.'"

And all Tim could do was laugh limply along with the others. The truth was, however bad he felt about it, he was still furious that he had such a rapport with Smith without it really being any use to him at all.

* * *

Eleanor was not the only one – Jane dreamed sometimes of fighting. She had once mentioned this to her husband, who had scoffed wordlessly and returned to his newspaper with a sour look on his face. He did not believe her. But the dream was always the same, and always had about the same clarity as a childhood memory – which is to say that it was not entirely clear, but that it seemed so much a part of her that she could not erase it. Indeed, she had first had the dream when she was six years old. 

In the dream she was astride a horse, amongst the rest of the cavalry. Their armour and their arms blazed, but over everything there was a light patina of dust. The day was hot and beneath the lowered visor, sweat rolled in thick tears down her cheeks. Then a cry went up, and the infantry went forth, pennants streaming. Through the dust, she thought she saw the enemy's infantry do the same. Her own men, beneath the varicoloured banners of Christian France, were in the less advantageous position. She felt only disgust when she observed the enemy. The cavalry began to move. She spurred her horse on. The cannons boomed. The horse began to gallop, its hooves churning the dust so that now nothing was visible that was not near – she sensed, rather than saw, the riders on either side of her. Before her she saw nothing. The veins in her cheeks and forehead pulsed violently and she heard the roar of the infantry as they clashed with the enemy footsoldiers. She rode on, picking her way through the knots of men locked in the embrace of the battle, the arrows falling like rain, and the boom of the guns now louder than ever. And she knew that what she felt beneath the hooves of her beast, so soft and yielding, was the flesh of hapless soldiers.

Her heart blazed but was all enmeshed with little thorns.

* * *

Eleanor had been in love once before. His name was Paul, and he was a fool of much the same type as Tim – an over-serious, physically slight fellow with a puckered forehead and a pained smile. He had been handsome, she now supposed, but it was very hard to recall his face without recourse to photographs. They liked to speak to each other in French; they liked to speak of poetry and art, and also of liberty and universal suffrage and the common rights of man. He was really from an English family, had spent much of his childhood in England, and spoke with an accent that was entirely Eton. But he excelled himself at rhetoric. Once, when she was away at the seaside with her family, she had fallen asleep after reading a most inflammatory letter from him, and dreamed that Napoleon's fleet was landing in the bay. 

This was how he had got in with certain people. She knew that the Socialists amongst the group, who said that there should be no revolution if it did not improve the lot of the ordinary man, were not fond of him. But the more intense young fellows, the poets and dreamers with nebulous dreams of green flags and the notion that perhaps, if one only wrote a thing in the right way, it might actually be thus, were very warm with him. It was after a meeting off Sackville Street that she saw him talking with Pearse himself, the two of them so animated that it really became quite repulsive to her. Up until that point, she had been all for it, mostly for Socialist reasons (she could not quite fool herself into being a Nationalist – it was not quite her place – for she belonged nowhere and to no one in particular, having been brought up in France and England). Then, suddenly, watching the two as they talked, and made vigorous masculine gestures, and their eyes sparkled, and their voices became indecently loud, she made a realisation.

Afterwards they went walking. "Such a great man," he had said, his eyes full of awe. "If anyone can free Mother Ireland, it is him."

She winced. "Have you read his poetry?"

"And what does that mean? His poetry expresses perfectly the nature of the times in which we live. Now, we will put down our pens, and take up our swords, and…"

"Because the only thing is," she said, as they paused to watch the rushing fountain, "it's really terrible poetry."

He was shocked. "Eleanor, I don't know what you mean by that. I mean, it is all a good deal more complex than the Shan van Vocht and any other Whiteboy anthems, if you're complaining about the level of technical skill. He can't equal Yeats, but he surpasses any of those crass little pieces of sentimental trash devised solely for farm labourers."

The thing about farm labourers, Eleanor reflected silently, was that they could actually do something useful. "Those Whiteboys," she said quietly, "are the people for whom you wish to fight."

He took her hand and looked at her imploringly. He thought it terribly romantic, she saw now. He kissed her hand gently, and said, ever so softly, "Naked I saw thee, O beauty of beauty, and I blinded my eyes for fear I should fail."

She smiled wanly at him, and was disgusted. She thought angrily that if he had ever seen her naked, he certainly wouldn't be blinding himself for any reason.

"You have to understand," he said, as though being very patient, "that they all go to fight for local grievances, and when someone hands them a gun they use it to shoot at ravens. But we, the poets, are part of a much older tradition." He saw no irony in that. He thought that one could be whichever nationality one chose. "We go to fight for our Mother, and we will not waste a single bullet."

Oh, horrible, horrible, that he would spurn her, with her live body that he had never really properly laid a finger on, for some imagined and abstracted grandmother! She saw now really that a good poet would not so easily surrender the fight between himself and expression; that he would not cave and begin painting slogans; that he would not spurn a live woman for an imagined one. She realised also that perhaps she'd hoped all this swapping of missives and passionate argument about Schiller might lead them into bed rather than through the doors of the Post Office. She wanted to mock him. She wanted to remind him of all the young men who had followed fictitious Werther to a very real death for the sake of fashion, and of Goethe's disdain for them, and of his remark in his old age: "Romanticism is disease, Classicism is health." She might have said, "Romanticism is impotence." But she did really love him, and so she only embraced him and tolerated him.

Even then, she had mostly turned away from him. She turned away from the Rising, using her femininity as an excuse. She watched from the sidelines. She thought on the paradox of an identity that depends upon failure as the ultimate symbol of valour – failure as a golden crown, or laurel wreath.

* * *

Hutchinson had never gone sick, or mad, as some had. He was, Tim knew, exactly what he had seemed to be at school. He was staunch and he was brave and he had a certain daring (and perhaps sadistic) streak. Because of this, he often saw far worse sights than Tim and said nothing of it. Only once did Tim witness him do anything untoward. 

At Arles, they had come across the body of a German soldier, still quite intact, eerily so. He was only a boy, perhaps as young as fourteen, and though his face was pale and his pupils dilated in their lifeless irises, he bore no other signifiers, no other marks that death had put upon him. He was propped up inside a shell hole. On his shoulder was perched a huge and very lively black crow. It tore hungrily at his flesh with its sharp metallic beak, and doubtless could not believe its luck. They stood for a moment, and watched its prancing over the boy, who seemed only to be sleeping. Then Hutchinson shot it.

When they overturned the boy, they found his back a seething, bloody mess of obliterated flesh and shattered bone.

Tim lay in bed, beside Baines, his 'ghost'. He was shirtless and, in the moonlight, something of an Obscure Object (possibly an object of desire, and certainly one of mystery). Tim couldn't very well wake him and tell him to clothe himself more thoroughly. He couldn't very well refuse to sleep alongside him when he saw now that the boy was patently terrified that he might well be a ghost, because he had heard Eleanor (from his hiding place inside the wardrobe) say that his uniform smelled like a corpse. Tim was struck again by the mysterious wholeness of him, and so remembering the dead German boy followed logically, if one obeyed the dream-logic. The Doctor had put Son of Mine to stand guard over England's fields. Tim watched the crows scatter before him. And then, since they were after all carrion birds, they swept up into the sky in great black spirals, and descended upon the fields of France – that marvellous feast. They danced merrily upon the bodies of the defiled dead.

Tim had not feared the rats half so much. The rats wanted only tinned food.


	4. Has It Begun To Sprout?

Update, you say? OK. Just - that whole 'chapters successively shorter' thing - not really happening with this one. Oh well. And also, I should take the opportunity to warn you that I realised I was being really coy about the slash, so this part of the story contains a moderate amount of sex and you oughtn't to read it if you are inappropriately young / averse to such base acts.

The title is from Eliot's The Wasteland, in reference to a corpse planted in a garden.

* * *

_At defessa labore membra postquam  
semimortua lectulo iacebant,  
hoc, iucunde, tibi poema feci,  
ex quo perspiceres meum dolorem.  
Nunc audax cave sis, precesque nostras,  
oramus, cave despuas, ocelle,  
ne poenas Nemesis reposcat a te.  
Est vemens dea: laedere hanc caveto._

But the half dead limbs were lying on the couch  
after having been exhausted by work,  
at this time, delightful one, I made poems for you,  
from which you may recognize my anguish.  
Now, beware that you may be daring, and I beg,  
beware that you may reject our prayers, little jewel,  
lest Nemesis demands punishment from you,  
she is a violent goddess, you shall beware to harm her.  
- Catallus 50

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—

For the reed which grows nevermore again

As a reed with the reeds in the river.  
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, _A Musical Instrument_

* * *

He would look across the Common Room, to see the mysterious head on its frail neck bent low over his Latin – Catallus, and unbeknownst to Hutchinson the poem currently being decanted from one linguistic vessel to another concerned the poet's friendship with Calvus, a fact perhaps ironic and certainly apt in light of the dark boy's musings – and would feel a quite diabolical sort of hatred welling up in him. However he tried to tell himself that it was because he couldn't stand someone who snivelled so and was so very affected, who lagged behind everyone else and had a habit of making an irritating wounded face when confronted with his perfidy, he knew that this was not quite true. But he did not analyse it. Why analyse it? Pointless. One ought to be friends with certain sorts of people; one ought not to be friends with certain other sorts of people. One certainly ought not to befriend a younger boy, because people would talk and often did – if the walls of Farringham School were not quite moist with the sighs of lovers trysting in the stairwells, they certainly contained boys often incapable of preventing themselves from striking up fanciful Hellenic friendships with others their junior, and a fair number frustrated enough by the absence of interaction with females to become discreet givers and receivers of rough and perfunctory sexual favours within the acceptable bounds of their own year. Hutchinson was not a romantic. He wasn't capable of hallucinating some mystical pseudo-Platonic bond with a boy whose laziness he despised; and if he was sometimes so hobbled by his own anatomy as to need a quick hand, he certainly wouldn't look to that particular hand, with its bitten nails and inkstained knuckles. 

Latimer looked up and Hutchinson looked away.

"Baines is taking an awfully long time," Hutchinson said, by way of subterfuge.

"Yes sir," said Latimer, and these two syllables carried the connotation that Baines was a bumbling idiot incapable of finding his arsehole with both hands and a candle. Didn't they? Hutchinson thought they did.

* * *

Tim rolled over. Eleanor was kissing him with her customary violence and he was glad. In the moonlight he saw the harsh blaze of white skin against black feathers. Hutchinson's hands gripped him and he felt his companion's stubbled face rasp on his. Winter passed in a cold burst of feathers. Now Martha, the diffuse glow of moonlight on dark skin, less violence, she was maternal, almost guiltily he sought to see if he agreed with Hutchinson's analysis. Summer, high summer, burning sun. The bag felt so tightly tied around his neck. Hutchinson's hands rolled him over again. Very well. It usually went this way. Then autumn, and everything weighed down with ripe fruit. He watched them come across the fields with scythes. He watched the crows scatter before him. He began to feel suffocated. He felt a weight pressing down on him, like the marble hand of God crushing him against the earth. He scrabbled at the string, and began hurriedly unwinding it, all the while feeling his consciousness slipping away. Before his eyes he saw the bare field, divested of its gold, but now there were no longer headless rows of corn but gaping shell holes, silent and mundane, no writhing corpses, only awful emptiness, and the crows came to land in the holes. He wanted to cry out. He tore the bag from his face and gulped down air. The headboard was in front of him. He felt his flesh entwined with someone else's and turned awkwardly to look over his shoulder. Baines was blushing furiously. "I thought you were awake," he stuttered. "Your eyes were open, you were talking. Did I hurt you? Please stay. Please."

* * *

Hutchinson's dislike of Eleanor was rapidly scaling new and angry peaks. He was holding her arm very tightly. "Listen," he spat into her ear, "it doesn't matter to me one whit that you want to go sneaking around in people's houses and stealing their property and making up wild lies – but my wife, despite your best efforts, is as yet sane, and I could do without your sending her into hysterics with stupid ghost stories." He knew he was holding her arm tightly enough to really hurt her, but she didn't flinch, and so he kept squeezing. She looked at him with half-lidded eyes, as though she could not be bothered to pay him full attention. Would anyone really miss her if he were to strangle her to death?

Jane ran back into the room. She had been doing that all morning – running about. It was ridiculous. She was a grown woman, however childlike her mind. It had started the night before, of course. She had come in looking distracted and upset somehow. When he had asked her, she had said nothing was the matter. Then at dinner, she had started talking about the Spiritualists and insisting that they go, which he assumed to be the usual blather, until he looked at her and saw her cheeks burning red. She had a fever. She began to gibber. He put her to bed, had cook make her hot drinks and the maid bring hot water bottles. She needed to sweat it out, he knew, but thus swaddled she began to take on almost a demonic aspect. Some of her blonde hair stood up, as if with static. "It's quite alright," she said. "I have a big enough heart to feed everyone." He ignored this. "It's quite alright that you don't love me," she said.

At this he stopped reading his book, somewhat guiltily. "Why do you say that?" he asked. "Of course I love you, Janet."

"_L'on dit q'amors est dolce chose_, but I'll still wear your favour, though you give me nothing but pain. And – there was a hunt, a white hart with nine tines that turned into a black hen and then a hissing snake and then a bar of iron."

"Oh, for God's sake." And he had gone down to the library to scowl at the volumes of history, family history, stupid little scraps that stretched back to the Normans, and wondered if he dared take a torch to them and solve all of this in one fell swoop.

The next morning her temperature had plunged back to the normal level. She seemed bright-eyed and clear and less talkative, though she would keep darting about. He told her not to leave the house, and went into the village to church.

When he returned, Eleanor was there. She said very little to him, but while they had tea she took something out of her pocket and began to play with it. When he saw what it was, he slammed his cup angrily down onto the table reflexively. "Where did you get that?" he said, in his calmest voice.

Open, close, click. "Guess."

"Tim gave it you?"

"Not quite." Open, close. Open, close. Click. Click. Open. He snatched it from her hand, at which point she feigned shock. He looked at its face, still at one minute past the hour, forever stopped.

"We went to Timothy's house," Jane said cheerfully, "and you'll never guess what we found, darling. We found clothes from Farringham."

"Whatever do you mean?"

"A uniform. It smelled like death – which is why, incidentally, people don't come back to life." He thought that was still the delirium talking, but had he examined the book by her bedside he would have found it to be a collection of tales of the Miwok Indians. "And it was far too big for little Timothy, we thought, and there had been the most tremendous banging, you ought to have heard it."

Eleanor said nothing as Jane continued to talk, only sat and smiled smugly at him.

* * *

When they shot the scarecrows, Hutchinson first felt that dark pulse hid beneath his own. He was not sure whether to be proud of it or not. It seemed, on the one hand, like a grown man's reaction and not a boy's. At the same time, there was something pagan and nebulous about it that he detested. It was not, he thought, _good_ – not in a Christian sense. It wasn't righteous anger at the destruction of a cruel foe, for he did not know what harm the scarecrows might possibly do him. It was something far more awful. He was shooting at something without a face. He did not fear that he was injuring other human beings, though he knew he must be. He felt instead a sort of dark delight in chaos and ruin. Something inside him wanted to laugh, as they toppled lifelessly to the ground. He felt the great mind of the school in him, the mind made up of all the other minds of all the other boys, and all the soldiers who had fought in Africa, and Nelson's forces, and Marlborough's, and those dim and distant crusaders with their plumes and pennants. It was a delight in chaos so ruthlessly ordered that he himself could not be harmed or diminished by it – it was a beast, kept on a chain, to savage thieves – it was chaos hemmed in by order so perfectly that he did not fear its strength. For a few moments, he ceased to exist, and he was filled brimful with the thundering footsteps of the shadowy regiment, where his own heartbeat ought to have been. 

And then he was back, himself once more. The guns had fallen silent, the footsteps were gone – now his own damp heart was beating loudly in his ears. Some of the smaller boys were weeping.

He was not sure whether or not to feel disgusted with his animality, when it transpired that the scarecrows were only rags and straw.

* * *

There was a sharp rapping at the door. Tim, grunting slightly with effort, slid out of bed and donned the nearest clothes. He wandered aimlessly downstairs. The rapping continued throughout this. He opened the door. 

Hutchinson was on the step, huddling to keep out of the rain that was beginning to fall. He looked exactly as men of his age and class were meant to: neatly clipped moustache, slight touch of premature grey in his dark forelock, eyes a little uneasy, chin up and upper lip resolutely stiff. Tim smiled at the thought that one of his legs was shorter than the other, and he hobbled in ordinary shoes. It was a special vulnerability that only a handful of people knew anything about. He reached sleepily towards Hutchinson's face, but found his hand batted away with embarrassment.

"Dear God man, not even up yet? It's noon," Hutchinson blustered as he stepped over the threshold.

"No, I, I didn't sleep well," Tim muttered, closing the door.

Hutchinson turned to him with a grin and stroked his cheek. "At least you barely have to worry about shaving."

Tim spluttered but was pleased. "Oh, leave off. That joke is out-dated by seven or so years."

"Four. I know you didn't shave regularly until towards the end of the war because I used to help myself to your razor."

Tim went through to make tea and Hutchinson followed him. He stood anxiously by the table. Tim motioned for him to sit down, but Hutchinson shook his head and cleared his throat. "I say," he said hesitantly, "it's the silliest thing – it really is damned ridiculous – only Jane came home in quite a state yesterday, and then today your fiancée came to dinner and the subject came up…"

They waited. "What subject?" Tim asked.

Hutchinson was looking at the floor, with a congested expression on his face. "They say they came here, sneaking around, God knows why, and they found –"

There was a creak from the doorway. Hutchinson started back. He looked from Baines to Tim. Baines was rubbing his eyes with his open palm, clad in sloppy jumper and pyjama trousers, seventeen years old, alive.

"Christ," Hutchinson said, unable to think of anything else to say.

"Hello," Baines said mournfully. "I see you grew up too."

* * *

Tim dreamed of Africa. It seemed that everything pointed that way. Everyone's fathers and uncles went to Africa. Everyone's fathers and uncles had fought in Africa. He sensed it out there, beyond the walls and the windows, the courtyard, drill and shooting, the fields, the sea. He had not yet had the revelation that would make him realise that Africa would likely remain a forbidden land to him – that for his generation, and for the Empire and for Europe, the next century would point inwards. So he dreamed of Africa. He had been planning to ask Martha, the maid, about it, only something told him she would not take it terribly kindly. Besides which, he ought not to talk to her anyway. And besides which, he was frightened of her because she was a girl and possessed most of the things that currently fascinated the boys. He fidgeted. The other boys were asleep, but from the next room there came a long, low wail. He didn't jump. He had seen spectres, but this was not one. He knew without needing to make sure that it was the younger Jenkins, crying for his mother, and Tim thought that if he possessed such an older brother as the elder Jenkins, he would probably be crying for his mother too. 

There was a thought. He might cry for his mother – he tried, and nothing came.

The wailing continued. This gave the whole building the mournful quality of a medieval abbey.

He was falling asleep now. The thoughts were mingling. Martha, Africa, fathers, mothers, baby brothers crying. He thought dimly of the conversation overheard between Hutchinson and Baines. He knew that if they were caught sneaking back in, somehow he would end up being punished for it, although he was curious as to how exactly they would skew things to ensure this. Thinking of this, he got up suddenly and went to the window. He looked back nervously over his shoulder. No one was awake.

Outside, he was sure he could hear a low growling. He was not frightened, only curious. He laid one arm across the length of the sill; the other he used to prop up his head. Between the dim lamplight of the entrance and the few rooms whose occupants were still untouched by sleep, and the bright moonlight, he could see really quite clearly. There was something happening just out of sight. Growling, and giggling. He was about to crane his head to get a closer look when he saw two familiar shapes dart across the bright ground. He ducked slightly, so that only the top of his head and his eyes appeared above the sill. They were not even trying particularly to be quiet, which didn't bode well. They had obviously drinking, and this meant that their chances of being caught and Tim's chances of being cast in the role of burnt offering had increased significantly.

"I suppose it's sort of funny," said the one voice, a kind of nasal drawl, "that you made that joke about Beanpole, and then you couldn't…"

"Shut up," hissed a second, lower, voice. "She was hideous."

"I could still do it."

"Because you don't have standards. Your knob doesn't have standards. You freak."

Then two dark shapes flitted into the protective shade of the wall.

"I can help you…"

"What on earth do you – stop that!"

Then there was a sort of stifled grunt.

"You see. It's really easy."

"Shut up, Baines."

Then there was a sigh, and a chuckle, and the angry voice said, "Don't come so close to me. No, I mean, put your hand back, yes, there. Don't put your face so close to me."

"Just imagine it's Latimer."

"Shut _up_! Oh."

There wasn't any more talking for quite a while, only stifled groaning. And then there was a sort of a gasp, and another chuckle.

"My hand's all dirty."

"Well, don't wipe it on me!"

"It's yours! What am I supposed to do with it?"

"You're disgusting. Disgusting. Let's get back. And you're not to tell anyone about this."

"Ohh, I was going to boast to _everyone_!"

Just as they were about to sneak back, the giggling resumed, and then a loud growl was heard. Tim had been slumping down tiredly, but drew himself up, the better to see.

"Oh stop it, stop it, Saul," a woman's voice simpered. The growling grew fiercer still. She squealed.

"I say," Hutchinson snapped, "who goes there?"

Suddenly the growling stopped, and the feminine voice said, "Is that one of the boys? What are you doing out at this time? I s'll tell the headmaster."

"It's that maid, isn't it?" Hutchinson guessed. "I forget your name. But you're the fat one, the loud one. And I could ask you the same question."

"Now look here," Saul snapped, and he advanced towards them so that Tim saw his form break momentarily free of the shadow, "you've got no right to say such a thing…"

Tim had seen the gardener with the maid, whose name, he recalled, was Jenny. He liked these occasional glimpses. If he were going around to the back of the school in order to be able to read some Montaigne or some Bayle, he might catch a glimpse of Jenny standing at the kitchen door, pretending to be helping cook, while Saul stood with his cap in his hands and said things that Tim couldn't hear but guessed were probably gently lewd jokes. It seemed the way that people were meant to develop and to grow, instead of being corralled into horrid little regiments and bombarded with God and war and not much else.

At the same time, he knew that the reason Hutchinson found it so repugnant was that he really didn't like women very much at all. It was hilarious, really, that they had to read the ancients in expurgated versions. What did the Latin master fear? That they might learn even more sophisticated methods of relieving themselves? Tim knew, and he knew that even knowing it put him on a very lonely precipice above the others, that in order to train boys for war, you must constantly frustrate them physically. That's what war was, he thought. The roar of blood that had nowhere left to circulate, and instead clouded men's eyes with red mist and made their tongues thick and heavy and their minds unyielding. Drill was a kind of magic that dissolved the individual in a great sea, and as such was a very good substitute for dance. Dance would only make them happy and indolent.

* * *

Tim felt that his heart was not merely beating but vibrating at an impossible speed, a magical frequency. Now there would be revelations, for all the little winding roads had met: Hutchinson had discovered Baines, the Spiritualists were imminent, and Joan Redfern almost certainly – no, certainly, certainly – had the Doctor as her houseguest. He watched as Hutchinson stared at the boy, who became uncomfortable and fidgeted. 

"This is impossible," Hutchinson said, with a dry mouth, though this was perfunctory – he said it because he felt he ought to, and both he and Tim knew this. Tim's only reply was to shrug and gesture with one hand, a gesture that meant "And yet…"

Hutchinson scrutinised Tim. He knew, had known since he had met him, that Tim did not fit into the world. He had been a really insufferable child, with a look of such aloofness about him that he was nearly impossible to like. Yet Hutchinson had liked, and with what was actually great sensitivity on his part, he rejected this as impossible and incongruous, and decided to go out of his way to make life difficult for Tim as compensation. Then there had been all the business with Beanpole and the scarecrows, which Hutchinson still did not fully understand. He only knew that ridiculous things happened around Tim, things that in any other instance would be impossible.

The stolen child padded across the floor and sat down at the table, not taking his eyes from Hutchinson. Tim continued making the tea. The silence filled the room like smoke.

Hutchinson felt the need to create some order within the situation. "Why isn't he dressed?"

"I haven't anything that fits him," Tim said, setting the cups down on the table.

"I'll bring something, then. You can't have him lolling about like this."

"What will you do?"

"I don't know yet." Tim poured the tea. "But you must do something."

"I will."

"Because… it's disgusting," Hutchinson said, and Baines blinked at him in surprise. Tim too looked up, and Hutchinson raised his hand slowly towards his mouth to cover it, but instead let it drop calmly to his side. He couldn't quite place his revulsion – it was wordless, but it made his skin crawl. It was immoral, really, for Baines to exist. It was not right. It was like an unpleasant smell.

"Perhaps take him to – whatever it is at the hall, the séance or table-turning or what-have-you."

"Yes, I thought of that."

"Well then," Hutchinson said quickly, "I must go."

"No!" cried Tim, "you mustn't! It's awful out there, look."

And indeed the rain was lashing down now. But Hutchinson shook his head. "I can't stay. I can't stay here. I'll bring the clothes for you. Jane wanted to go anyway. We'll get this sorted out. Good bye."

Normally Tim would have embraced him, but Hutchinson turned abruptly and left the room. After a moment, the door slammed. Tim looked at Baines, who put his head in his hands and moaned, "He isn't even pleased to see me. I say, do you think it is me?"

He didn't raise his head as he said it. Tim did not say that he had felt just as Hutchinson had, at least to begin with. "I think it is you," he said softly, unsure whether he was lying or not. "I certainly don't think you mean any harm."

* * *

They were going to lose their respective virginities. It had to be done. There was no point being cooped up in here, losing one's mind, when outside there was a veritable torrent of the stuff waiting to be had. Although Hutchinson tried not to think too hard about the exact details, Baines and Baxter had been poring over a medical textbook acquired by Jenkins major, sniggering at clinical depictions of the vulva. Hutchinson didn't want to look at it. It was too much like a grotesque mouth. They had laid this side by side with Rubens' _Three Graces_ (also repulsive to Hutchinson, all that mountainous flesh). They were terribly excited. Hutchinson tried to pretend that he too was terribly excited, and not merely rather nauseous. Jenkins had procured someone for them. Hutchinson did not have great hopes of a milk-white neck or golden curls. (In actual fact, when he had a private moment, he did not conjure up either of these things to amuse him, but rather the dark skin and hair of the maid from London) 

Night fell by increments. They crept from their beds. All the way into town there was much posturing and bravado, boasts of anticipated longevity and ability, coarse threats, bursts of braying laughter. Hutchinson suspected that the others' nerves all jangled as horribly as did his, only they would not admit it. It seemed to him a slightly degraded thing to be paying for it, but never mind. It had to be done. Baines had a half-bottle of whisky that he had stolen from the gardener earlier that day, which they all passed around and swigged from.

The house was at the end of the High Street, just past the butcher's shop. The smell of blood and sawdust made Hutchinson rather sick, and he was glad that it was dark enough that the others could not see his face. Jenkins knocked, and the door opened. They did not catch sight of the woman's face, as Jenkins immediately fell into conversation with her, and she went up the stairs ahead of him. But they could all hear her voice, broad Norfolk, and for the first time they all fell silent.

Upstairs was a room that sloped at one end like a garret, and this portion was curtained off. There were four chairs and a table, at which Jenkins and Hutchinson and Baines sat, while Baxter disappeared behind the curtain with the briefly glimpsed but large-rumped woman. Jenkins took from his pocket a pack of playing cards, and dealt them.

Hutchinson forced himself to play.

"I say," Baines said, with a smirk, "are you quite alright? Better not be getting cold feet."

"It isn't his feet he need worry about," Jenkins quipped, and then spluttered with laughter.

Baines laughed nasally. Jenkins was the only one amongst them to have lain with a woman, several in fact, all paid ladies purchased by a kindly uncle, and he spoke little of it and had the calculating look of the experienced rogue. Baines had once got his finger into the moist orifice of a second cousin during a summer game of sardines, and talked about it continually and sometimes quite loudly. Hutchinson did not talk, which allowed the other boys to draw their own conclusions; thankfully, they seemed to have surmised that he knew exactly what he was doing, due perhaps to the fact of his brooding physical presence.

There was some audible and embarrassing grunting and yowling from behind the curtain. After a surprisingly short while, Baxter appeared, looking pale and drained. Baines was next. Then Hutchinson drew the curtain aside and entered into the creature's lair, trying not to show just how apprehensive he was.

She was lying on a rickety little bed, fully clothed but somewhat flushed. Hutchinson saw how old she was, how wrinkled her hands, the grey in her hair. Her skirt was hoisted up around her waist – vainly did he avert his eyes, a moment too late. It was her eyes that he loathed worst of all. They were servile, unconscious eyes – had they even shown any sign of pain or displeasure, he might have been equal to the task. As it was, he turned on his heel and left.

* * *

Confusingly, in the war there were both emotions – there was the familiar feeling, the sound of all the many pounding feet of his predecessors, the great dark unconscious delight – and at the same time, disgust, pure and simple. He was disgusted at seeing other human beings die. He discovered this almost with surprise, that to see men bleeding and screaming had some impact upon him even if they were his enemies. Worst of all, he began to see that he was not like other soldiers, who might subconsciously bungle and shoot to miss. Hutchinson almost never missed, though he understood now the implications of his actions. He supposed that this made him a monster. When he told Tim this, one evening when they were safely behind the line, Tim smiled sadly at him and said, "Oh no, I think that's true heroism." "But it's ghastly." "Yes. But it's what heroism amounts to." 


	5. On Another Man's Wound

So, I did think that I would try to make the chapters successively shorter until the end, but I realised I couldn't do this without a lot of boring expository dialogue, and I never use exposition or indeed dialogue when a nice symbol will do. So another long'un. The title is from Ernie O'Malley's memoirs of the conflict in Ireland, but comes from a colloquialism the gist of which is that it's easy to feel satisfied with your own lot when confronted with the suffering of others.

Since I'm nearing the end - indeed, I have the final couple of chapters more or less written - I have to say that this has been a really interesting experience for me, writing in installments and with characters invented by someone else - within a kind of pre-existing framework. And it's been really fun as well. And I'm sorry I'm not mature enough to write about English public schoolboys and not have them have sex with each other, but we all have our cross to bear.

Once again - do, please, review.

* * *

Who is stronger than hope? Death.

Who is stronger than the will? Death.

Stronger than love? Death.

Stronger than life? Death.

But who is stronger than _Death_?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.  
- Ted Hughes, _Examination At The Womb Door_

* * *

The one of them said to his mate,

'Where shall we our breakefast take?'

'Downe in yonder greene field,

There lies a knight slain vnder his shield.

'His hounds they lie downe at his feete,

So well they can their master keepe.

'His haukes they flie so eagerly,

There's no fowle dare him come nie.'

Downe there comes a fallow doe,

As great with yong as she might goe.

She lift vp his bloudy hed,

And kist his wounds that were so red.

She got him vp vpon her backe,

And carried him to earthen lake.  
- The Child Ballads: 26. The Three Ravens

* * *

The Son of the Family was a creature of appetite. Movement always, hunger, eternal and savage. The boy did not have any awareness of this, only the faintest dimmest yearning of his own, the need to live once more, that was quite lost in the bilious maelstrom of continual desire. It was agony to be a formless cloud; it was sweet agony to be a creature of flesh and blood. Yet he couldn't quite be concrete, for anything that he took would wither when he took it. Instead of housing himself in a form, he merely absorbed the pain and desperation of whichever creature had once possessed that form, and his hunger remained unabated. Yet he was superior to Mother and Father, who were mere bursts of hunger, bright bursts like fireworks, for he had the knack of organising, he knew that there must be a method. And he could scent the delicious length of the Doctor's life, and he knew that they must take it. Until then, continual hunger, embracing without consummation, like a knight in a fairytale who loves his liege's lady. But now they had the scent of the white hart, and like the knight's pointers they pursued it. 

To be guarding the fields was to have been martyred, painful yet fitting. He saw into another world. He was quiet, though inside him there were still little lives that would have ached and bellowed mournfully for what was lost, if they could. But they would cease to recall what it was to be alive, soon enough.

The one thing that he wanted, at times, was his Sister.

* * *

Tim had not been aware that anyone other than Hutchinson would arrive at his house later in the afternoon, and yet Eleanor and Jane were both with him. "I told them that you had a visitor, but nothing else," Hutchinson whispered as they entered the house. "Between you and me, I think that they are plotting something." 

They both seemed extraordinarily cheerful, and Jane in particular had a secretive look about her that was obviously causing Hutchinson some discomfort. Tim knew, though they had not discussed it explicitly, that Hutchinson felt that the war had changed women irrevocably and for the worse – they now had these notions of equality, and wore skirts above the ankle (though Eleanor, Tim was pleased to note, was, as a bohemian, always in pre-Raphaelite long skirts), and had developed a ghastly little system of secrecy amongst themselves. They were more physically intimate with each other, Hutchinson thought. They had lost sight of why they needed men.

It was a broken world they lived in now, and it had split men and women in two just as Zeus had when first the cartwheeling children of the sun, and moon, and earth, tried to make war upon heaven.

"I'm not sure why you felt the need to accompany me," Hutchinson informed his wife stiffly.

"Oh, darling, I imagine he'll look quite ridiculous if we let you see to him," Jane replied, with a golden laugh that made her husband visibly flinch. Her eyes focused on Tim. "You ought to have seen," she said, shaking her head maternally, "what he had picked out for your visitor – I've never seen such a horrid pile of rags."

"And where is your visitor?" Eleanor finished, without missing a beat.

And, without a pause, Baines appeared in the doorway. He was wary of them. He smiled wanly and said, "Hello," in a quiet voice, and extended a hand.

"Hello," Eleanor said, taking it. She stared at him, her mouth open a little, and then remembered her manners and said, "I'm Eleanor, Tim's fiancée."

"Pleased to meet you," he mumbled. "Jeremy Baines."

And then Jane introduced herself. She was not nearly as transfixed as Eleanor, but she smiled at him pleasantly all the same. Hutchinson cleared his throat. "Here," he said, roughly taking the bag of clothes from Jane and pushing them into Baines' hands.

"No, no," Jane said equably, taking some of them back. "You put on what you have there, Ed – Jeremy, and then come back down to us." It was not even a particularly obvious slip, but Hutchinson heard it.

He padded up the stairs.

Then Eleanor looked at Tim shrewdly and asked, "Who is he?"

"Just, I suppose, an old friend," Tim said off-handedly. "Have you got my watch?"

She began to hand it to him, and then held it back as he reached for it. "He's very young," she said slowly.

"That's what I thought," Jane agreed.

"And he does seem rather like he doesn't fit."

"Certainly, there's something very incongruous about him, I saw it as soon as I looked at him."

They were talking to each other now. The men might as well not have been present. Hutchinson gave Tim a baleful look. "The watch," Hutchinson snapped.

Eleanor glanced at him as though considering arguing, bristling at the way he had spoken to her. But she pressed it tenderly into Tim's hand. "I don't understand why it's so important anyway," she muttered. "And you aren't usually so sentimental."

"It isn't just sentimentality," Tim said. "Time is important to me. It seems that everyone else has a very instinctive grasp of this business of living one's life from one end to the next – well, I don't. You must forgive my attachment to the object, only it feels to me like the concrete realisation of that fact."

* * *

Jane and Edward would play hide-and-seek in every dark corner of the house. They would tramp through the rooms in nearly identical dress – Jane would wear one of Mummy's petticoats with a yellow scarf, and Edward would wear the same but with a red scarf, and they would carry wooden bows and arrows. The petticoats were silk and so were the scarves, because the Mongols had worn silk underwear to deflect the arrows of their enemies; because the arrows flew with a corkscrew motion, and silk does not tear, the arrows would get caught and twist the silk tightly, and the Mongol warrior had only to unscrew the arrow from the bunched fabric and continue on his merry way. 

Sometimes a bird would fly out of one of Jane's dreams, cross the nursery on spectral wings, and enter Edward's dream. Upon discussing this, they would conduct a thorough examination of the house and find the offending bird perched inside a crest adorning a flagon in the dining room.

* * *

When Baines had returned downstairs, a smile cleft Jane's face in two. He was wearing shirt and trousers – now the women set about dressing him. The rain hissed softly outside. Hutchinson was simmering angrily, and so to distract him, Tim said, "Listen.". It was a dripping sound, the water dripping from the eaves. 

"Stillicide," Tim said.

"I say, is that really a word or did you invent it?"

"I believe Keats invented it. It's my favourite."

"Curious." Hutchinson chewed his moustache slightly. Then he looked embarrassed.

Tim, delighted, asked, "What?"

"Oh – oh, before one has the word for something, it doesn't quite seem to – ah, _exist_, in the same way."

Eleanor grinned bitterly at this. She understood it well enough, she knew what the Gaelic League and Thomas Davis had been up to, but she decided not to mention it. Jane was now helping Baines on with his jacket, as Eleanor wound a scarf around his neck. He had been protesting, of course, that he could do these things perfectly well himself – but Eleanor noticed the change in his bearing, and how happy he seemed to be, being coddled. It was so hard not to coddle him. They decided to get inside the overcoat with him. "Look," Jane crowed happily, as he squirmed, embarrassed, between them.

"For God's sake, leave him alone," Hutchinson said disgustedly.

"He's so young, isn't he?" Eleanor said, as they released him. "I think I invented him," she said, looking Baines straight in the face. He faltered and blushed, which made her laugh loudly.

"Oh, stop bullying him," Tim said affably, "you pair of mad women."

"But I'm not lying. I'll show you. I'll show you later, _dar_ling." And, with these mysterious words, she placed a hat ceremoniously upon Baines' head. She and Jane stood back to admire the effect. Baines was almost wholly obscured.

"I say, it looks like your laundry has decided to take the air," Eleanor chuckled. Jane laughed too, and they held onto each other like schoolgirls as they giggled.

"It's not my fault," Hutchinson snarled, "that he hasn't grown."

And the force with which he uttered these words, coupled with just how incomprehensible they were, caused everyone to fall silent, and for a moment all that could be heard was the sound of the rain and its slow trickling from the eaves.

* * *

"It's starting to rain," Cecily said, and she turned her head swiftly so that her hair brushed his face. The ivy was thick, and although the leaves began to tremble agitatedly, neither of them felt particularly wet. 

"Do you think they've forgotten all about us?" she asked. Her head was still turned away from him, so that he got very little of her voice. What he had, in abundance, was the smell of her neck. He found himself unable to say very much.

"I say, Germs, did you hear me?" She turned back to him now. A feather's width separated the tips of their respective noses. It was not so dark that he couldn't see her, but it was dark enough that he felt comfortable. "You're so dense."

But her voice wavered a little when she said it. Blindly, he fumbled with her skirts.

First she said, "Germs, stop it." And then she made a little gasp, and for a moment shifted about as though she were quite pleased with this turn of events. But perhaps he was overenthusiastic, and oughtn't to have used his whole hand, because soon she was shouting loudly, "Stop it, you fool, it hurts, it hurts."

They lingered under the ivy until the rain lightened, and then went back into the house, where the others were eating their tea placidly. He was starving and ate two large slices of cake. After a moment, he realised that she was staring at him with something between disgust and pity.

"Are you always so hungry?" she asked. "Always?"

Her mother shushed her.

* * *

The hall was near-silent. They shuffled in one at a time and took seats before the podium. A dour-looking collection of people on one side of the stage must be the mediums – and they appeared disappointingly earnest, red-faced, gentle. Something told Tim that perhaps this would not be as amusing as he had hoped, and nor would it find them any answers, but he sat back and tossed Eleanor a conspiratorial smile. She sat at his left. On his right was Baines, and, beyond him, Hutchinson and Jane. The atmosphere was both hot with anticipation and simply, in terms of temperature, hot – everyone was itchy in their wet woollen coats, and the breath of others tickled one's face. 

People began to trickle in, as much, he supposed, because it was a rainy afternoon as anything else. But soon he became aware of a very distinct contingent in the makeup of the audience. There were many widows and brides-that-never-were. So, when the speaking began, he knew that he ought to be contemptuous of the man who spent a long time engaged in conversation with a woman whose husband had died shortly before the armistice – he knew he ought to see this as manipulative and cruel. But it was clear that, though the gentleman was obviously extracting the information from her, piece by piece, he did it entirely unconsciously, and she responded in kind. And then there was a perfunctory and comforting message from the afterlife, and the woman, weeping with relief, turned to her daughter and hugged her.

It was too pitiful to be entertainment.

There was a noise at the back of the hall, and those assembled turned to see Joan Redfern, who smiled, embarrassed, and folded her umbrella, and embarked towards a seat at the front of the hall. Tim had imagined the scene so frequently, the Doctor striding to the front of the room with Martha in tow, producing some intricate gadget from his pocket, talking at great speed and intermittently bugging his eyes out, lights, vaporisations, secrets revealed – that he actually emitted a little gasp of disappointment. Following close behind Joan was a shambling woman in a grey coat, and behind her was a thin and sallow girl of about thirteen years.

* * *

As they had walked into town, Eleanor had taken his arm and held him back from the others. He huddled under her umbrella (not as awkwardly as he might have wished, for he was not much taller than she), and took her sketchbook carefully when she handed it to him. "Must I look now?" 

"If you want to understand what I meant earlier," she said, with a smile. "I won't show it you again. And please don't drop it this time, I couldn't bear it if it fell into a puddle."

He opened the book and flipped through it, unsure as to what he was looking for until he found it. It was a sketch of a boy in roughly the posture of the Dying Gaul, reminiscent of St Sebastian, drawn in the same heavy Blakean style as everything else that Eleanor drew, only perhaps a little slighter to emphasise the youth of the subject. But for some reason it reminded him also of the pornographic picture Hutchinson had given him, and in the corner of the page there was a cluster of unfinished heads, with horns in various styles, that seemed to confirm that Eleanor had indeed been thinking of this. The figure did not have a clear face but was convulsing as though in agony, and this convulsion was so accurately rendered that once again Tim wondered what Eleanor had done with herself in Ireland.

"Do you see the resemblance?" she asked.

He fumbled with it. "It could be anyone," he said.

"Tim! You're getting rain all over it." And with that, she snatched it back.

* * *

There was only one individual who seemed to be what they had expected, or rather what they had secretly hoped for and simultaneously dreaded. His name was given as Benzelius, and though he was otherwise modern enough, he wore an eighteenth-century-style frock coat. He had a calm, smooth, unnerving face with eyes set deep in his head, and a mouth that in some oblique way seemed to suggest that he was a charlatan just as plainly as if he'd said it himself. Eleanor grew very excited when she glimpsed him; they were certain that his would be great feats of smoke and snake oil. Their anticipation rose further when he made some allusions to a spirit-guide. 

But alas, here also they were disappointed. Tim began to feel boredom set in, and fidgeted. His mind roamed throughout time, into the future, trying to see Eleanor, but all he saw was the baby. There would, he knew for certain, be a child.

Jane was the only one to look at all alert, and Hutchinson was quite alarmed to see her so. She was beginning to frighten him quite terribly now, sitting straight-backed, her eyes bright and attentive. He himself could have cared less about the whole thing, until his ears briefly caught a snippet of what the odd, boring little man was saying – "Marriage is forever," he said, with great seriousness. "A righteous marriage is the binding together of two souls in a process of continual refinement, so that the bond cannot be broken even in the afterlife." A righteous marriage? Hutchinson looked at his wife once more.

When Benzelius began to speak of marriage as the union between wisdom, represented by the man, and love, represented by the female, Eleanor snorted loudly and Tim glared at her, not because he didn't take her point, but because other people had looked round.

And Tim could see them, the wives whose husbands had never returned, some of whom had damp and silent faces. He would rather that Eleanor saw his approbation than theirs, for theirs was fearsome, and had its origins in the wellspring of ancient grief. Joan Redfern had sufficient self-control not to cast such a glance, but Tim saw her face momentarily blank.

* * *

After a little while, Jane became aware of a shadowy figure who stood beside Benzelius and mimicked his every movement. The figure was as faint as breath upon glass, but had the dark sheen of oily feathers. She watched, fascinated, the long curving beak and sparkling eyes. No one else appeared to see this figure, and she realised why when its hands suddenly fiddled behind its head, and the feathered face and sharp beak came away easily. 

It was Edward.

* * *

Then they all returned to being bored for a long while, and eventually the sermonising reached its end. As they were going out, Tim looked sadly at Baines and said, "Well, that was a waste of time. We still don't know what to do." 

"We have to get him to the hidden land," Jane said, matter-of-factly.

They all stopped to look at her. The rain was battering hard at their umbrellas, rebounding off them with great force. "Whatever do you mean?" Eleanor asked.

"She's still feverish," Hutchinson muttered, tight-lipped.

"I'm certainly not," Jane said, and the others realised that they had never seen her speak to him in anger before.

"The hidden land," Jane informed them. "Edward told me. While we were in there, he was whispering to me. He is in the hidden land, and so are all the other boys. It's the land of the dead and dying and half-dead and thought-to-be-dead."

The thought made them all silent. Tim squeezed Baines' arm gently and without realising he did it, and this tender gesture angered both Eleanor and Hutchinson, though they said nothing of it.

"That's nonsense," Hutchinson said eventually. "In any case, it's an impossibility. Even if there were such a place – "

"If there were such a place," Tim informed him, "there would be a lot of doors to it, if one only knew where to look." Doors under hawthorn trees, he was thinking, and rivers that run into underground caves, and dark places beneath bridges.

"Is that not Joan Redfern?" Eleanor asked, raising her arm to point.

They made her out through the sheet of rain, in the act of bidding farewell to her cousin and cousin's daughter. And then her relations set off towards her little house, and she set off in quite the opposite direction. They watched her go. Then, with barely a glance at one another, they followed her.

* * *

To be a person is, it must be said, infinitely superior to being a formless gas trapped in a glass bulb. And it means that one can do such cruel things, for cruelty is so inherent in humanity that it passes almost without notice. You realise I could quite easily have lived out the rest of your life like this? I might have gone home at the end of the school term and your mother and father, rather more occupied with the antics of George and Robert than you, would have been none the wiser as long as you kept eating and breathing and making the right noises. They might even have been pleased at this change in you, this sudden focus and discipline and the evaporation of your usual gormlessness. In the war, with myself as pilot, you would have been a hero – for I have prior knowledge of all of these events, and I am impossibly cruel. You could have married Cecily, who would have been so grateful for such a husband. You would be exactly as an Englishman is supposed to be: silent and unostentatious and entirely heartless. 

If I could live so long, or be satisfied by such things.

* * *

"What in God's name," Hutchinson began, for Baines had suddenly turned and run off along the road that led out of town. Jane glanced at them, dropped her umbrella, and sprinted after him. Hutchinson made to follow, but Eleanor stopped him. She looked to Tim. 

"You go on ahead," she said, "and I'll catch up with them."

Hutchinson would have argued, but Tim shook his head at him, and they continued on, while Eleanor pursued the rapidly receding shapes ahead of her. She had to lift her long skirts for fear of tripping, and the velvet quickly became soaked and heavy. Through the rain it was hard to make out the others distinctly, but once she swore that what she saw ahead of Jane was not human at all, but an animal.

* * *

First he changed into a white hart. This hurt. His fear grew worse, and he ran still faster, impelled by the wild beating of his heart. He saw only black and white blurs. His eyes rolled in his head.

* * *

But somehow, she had caught him. She grabbed at him, throwing her arms around his neck. Her legs scraped painfully along the muddy ground, but she held tight, even as he tried to shake her off. Her fingers locked as though in prayer.

* * *

They had ceased running, Eleanor saw. Baines was nowhere to be seen. Jane had fallen to the ground. Eleanor rushed to help her, and started back in horror when she saw that Jane held in her arms a large snake, that twisted violently from side to side and did all it could to shake her off. She would not let go. Eleanor bent down, but Jane screamed, "Stay back!" The snake was beginning to wrap itself tightly around her waist and chest, hissing loudly.

* * *

And then the hissing was the hiss of steam as it poured off a bar of molten iron. Jane had clutched it to her chest – its outer layer was a dull red, though inside it was white with heat. She screamed and screamed. It was adhering to her skin, burning through her clothes to her pelican-heart. She had never felt such searing, not even when she lay silently alongside her husband in bed, and his face was the face of a stranger. But she knew that she could not let go. She clutched it to her as though it were a baby.

* * *

Eleanor, horrified, began trying to prise Jane's fingers from the metal, singeing her own in the process, but Jane screamed at her again. The light in the heart of the iron seemed to be twisting and writhing just as the snake had, and the steam was making a fearful jet. Jane wept tears that felt, to her, like tears of blood.

* * *

And then the jet of steam was breath, and he was a youth once more. He lay, exhausted, his eyes unseeing. Jane crouched over him. She clutched him tightly, just as tightly as the iron bar or the snake or the hart. She was sobbing violently. Eleanor dropped to her own knees and hugged her friend tightly, and for a moment they knelt in the rain. Then Eleanor got to her feet, and extended her hand, and Jane took it, and after slumping back for a moment in the mud, as though he were quite possibly considering staying there, Baines reluctantly stood and followed them.

* * *

Joan did not turn once to look behind her, as she went. She seemed terribly single-minded, and were it not for that, and for the dawning realisation of where she was going, Tim would have wondered to what end they were following her. It had seemed like the natural thing to do; when she made for the Cartwright house, Tim knew that this intuition had been right. 

It had stood unmolested since the catastrophe. No one wanted anything to do with it. The villagers were not sure exactly what had happened, but there was a bad feeling about the place. Even children would not play there, though they spoke of it in hushed tones and dared each other to knock at the door and so forth. The windows were filthy, so that nothing could be seen inside – but now, Tim realised with a chill, there was a light shining somewhere inside. He tapped Hutchinson's arm lightly, and they withdrew into another doorway as Joan stopped, glanced about her, and rummaged in her pocket. Having found whatever she was looking for, presumably a key, she set about opening the door, and, with one last glance, disappeared inside.

Hutchinson was staring at Tim. He had a protective arm around him. "What are we doing?" he murmured tersely.

"We're going to find the hidden land," Tim said, with a smile.

"Tim – "

"No, I mean," Tim's voice became a conspiratorial whisper, "I really think that – he – might be here."

"Your Doctor?"

"You needn't sound so sceptical. You _know_ that what happened, the scarecrows, the bombardment, you know that it wasn't natural."

Hutchinson did know; but he did not feel exactly certain. His memories were such a jumble that he wondered if he might not have imagined certain things, as he had once seen plainly, upon the battlefield, a huge and filthy raven picking at the corpses. It was far vaster than an ordinary bird, almost the size of a horse, and it was not frightened by the shells or bullets. It seemed not to see them. He had never told Tim this. Tim did not need to suspect that he was going mad. Tim needed to believe that he was strong. But all the same, it made it hard for him to trust his own recollection.

"Please," Tim whispered. "Please."

Hutchinson kissed him lightly. "Very well," he said. "I suppose it won't do any harm."

But they were both, of course, horribly frightened that it would.

* * *

Eleanor examined Jane as they walked. She had not a mark on her, except that her knees were badly scraped – but the bar had left no burns of any kind. She smiled. Baines walked alongside them, stumbling as though sleep-walking. 

They had finally returned to the spot where they had parted ways from Tim and Hutchinson. The sky was almost entire dark now, the clouds so thick that there was no moonlight, and the air was painfully cold. The only light came from a single streetlamp. Eleanor let out a little cry. "Oh goodness, how stupid of me! We don't know where they are. We've lost them."

"The Cartwright house," Jane said matter-of-factly. "Edward says that's where they are."

Eleanor sighed. "It isn't that I don't believe you," she began.

Then there was a great flapping overhead, and a dim shape whipped past the light of the streetlamp and briefly obscured it. Jane chased after it, and Eleanor and Baines followed her. They followed it down a little street, where it suddenly evaporated.

Before them stood the Cartwright house. There was a light shining boldly from a downstairs window.

"You see," Jane said. "I'm right."

* * *

When you write something, it is like a baby. It exists in you, but it is separate from you. It may contain things that you didn't put it into it, say things that you never intended it to say. When you have finished it, it seems utterly separate and self-sufficient, except for the strange family resemblance, the way that you can see, in its features, traces of your own. While you write it, you feel it grow. It moves inside you mysteriously. It kicks. It wants to be alive, it wants to live. It does not wait for a seemly moment in which to be born, and it hurts to give birth to it. 

Likewise, it hurt the Doctor to become John Smith, and to become the Doctor once more. Why, then, did he do it? He didn't love this woman, although he had great respect for her and was thankful for her quick mind and her courage. He liked her, vaguely, in an abstract sense. He wished her well.

He knew, as well, that this arrangement made her faintly uncomfortable – that she had not asked for it, that it was even as much a source of pain as of happiness to her. But there was a little piece of him that was restless, that would throw out images of their wedding day, their baby, like a distress signal. He would try to pacify it. "Every year," he would murmur softly. "Every year, in November. Wait, be patient."

It was hard for him. He often got so caught up in other things that he forgot entirely about it, but Martha had taken to reminding him at certain intervals, between adventures, so to speak. This meant that sometimes it would have been only a few days, to him, since the last visit, once even only a few hours.

But it was always the same to John Smith. It had always been an eternity. He was always grateful. He usually wept a little.


End file.
